What is your corporation’s social media policy?
Every company thinking about being active in social media needs to have some sort of policy around transparency and disclosure. The debates seems to be how heavy handed do you make your policy? Do you leave no room for doubt? Do you take a hands off approach?
Some policy’s range from Microsoft’s “Don’t do anything stupid.” to more complex lawyer written policies. Some recommend a simple URL link in a blog comment as enough transparency while companies like Dell require employees to add ‘atDell” to the end of their names.
At HP, management refers employees to our existing Standards of Business Conduct with some additional guidelines specific to social media. In those additional guidelines the overarching theme is full disclosure, transparency and respect but it’s largely left open to individual interpretation.
What if your company doesn’t have a stated social media policy? The Blog Council has just released a do-it-yourself Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit.
From the announcement:
Go to http://blogcouncil.org/disclosure and make it your own:
- Discuss, comment, critique, contribute
- Create your own policy
- Share your version with the community
This is a great starting point. What is your companies policy? Do you have a disclosure policy, or a general social media policy? What do you think is missing from most corporate policies? Is there one approach that’s better than another?
Technorati Tags: Disclosure, Transparency, The Blog Council, Policy
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Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Here is Sun Microsystems guidelines on Public Discourse
http://www.sun.com/communities/guidelines.jsp
The overall theme seems to be similar to HP, be honest, be respectful and don’t write anonymously.
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
Rich, thanks for the link. Did MySQL have a policy before being acquired? I know they were very open with blogging. I always liked how they aggregate all the blogs into PlanetMySQL.
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 11:01 am
MySQL had a similar policy to Microsoft; Write whatever you want, but (i) if you’re worried about what your Mom, manager, ex-coworker, or Larry Ellison would think, listen to your instinct because (ii) if the cat is out of the bag, you cannot get it back in. As we prepared for an IPO last year there were some other guidelines, but it was mainly not to share finance information.
PlanetMySQL is an interesting aggregate where any blog related to MySQL can be added. It is run by the MySQL Community team and hosts some of our biggest fans, many employees and a few critical users.