12 Considerations For Your Important Social Media Policy

With the increasing benefits of social media as a tool for professional marketing, and considering that social media is a consistent factor in many employee’s personal lives, it is crucial that companies have policies in place to manage and monitor what is being said and to help control how their companies may be perceived. A social media policy will help in mitigating risk for both the company and the employee and should be included as part of your personnel policies.

Here are 12 points that Corporate Office Centers considered in establishing its social media policy:

1. News Media – Identify how your news media contacts should be handled, and who is authorized to speak on behalf of your company.
2. Confidentiality – Address release of confidential and propriety information. Your policy should prevent disclosure of any sensitive information.
3. Disclaimers – Employee’s comments regarding any aspect of your business should include a disclaimer that states that they are individual views and not company views.
4. Trademarks and logos – Your policy should exclude use of trademarks and logs without written permission.
5. Legal – Postings should respect copyright, privacy, fair use, financial disclosure, and other applicable laws.
6. Blogs, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and other networking sites – Accounts should require written company approval to be established.
7. Administrative access – Decide who will have administrative access to your company’s authorized social media accounts. Make sure that that you have access to all of the accounts.
8. Citing and referencing customers – Citing or referencing clients without their approval should not be allowed.
9. Respect audience – Address conduct that would not be acceptable in your workplace; avoid discussions of politics and religion or any other objectionable topic.
10. Code of conduct – If your company has a code of conduct, you should reference this. Your employees’ online presence reflects you company.
11. Monitoring – Consider stating that all e-communications are subject to monitoring.
12. Business use – Define an acceptable amount of use during business hours and state that activities should not interfere with Work From Home commitments. Be sure to include that activities are for business use only.

The prevalence of social media is expected to rise and is a marketing benefit to almost all companies with its instantaneous dissemination capabilities; a benefit over traditional media channels. Companies should learn social media and embrace it as another media outlet to create company, product and brand awareness, however unless a social media policy is in place and enforced, companies are at risk for defamation lawsuits, disclosure of proprietary information, intellectual property infringement and other unwanted lawsuits or issues that could harm your company.