This is part 2 of an ongoing twitter them, view Part 1.
As Social Media blurs the boundaries between work and play many corporations have applied related rules to their employees. The same issues apply to associations and clubs.
WallCann has put together a brief overview of the guidelines we use. These four main principles are the core of many current corporate social blogging rules.
- corporate bloggers are personally responsible particularly when acting as a company representative
Example: Blogs, including microblogging sites like Twitter, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. Employees/Staff/Members are personally responsible for their posts.
- they should abide by existing rules,
Example: As a condition of your employment, you agreed to abide by the rules of the Company Handbook. This also applies to your blogging, twitter and social media activities.
- And keep secrets
Example: …it’s perfectly OK to talk about your work and have a dialog with the community, but it’s not OK to publish the recipe for one of our secret sauces (any confidential information).
- And be nice.
Example: You may not post any material that is obscene, defamatory, profane, libelous, threatening, harassing, abusive, hateful or embarrassing to another person or any other person or entity. This includes, but is not limited to, comments regarding company employees, partners and competitors.
Some other common principles are
- Add value - Bloggers are recommended to be relevant, to write about what they know.
- Respect copyright
- Follow the law
- Discuss with your manager - Bloggers should discuss with their managers if they in any way are uncertain about what they’re going to write.
In some cases these may need to be added
- You can / cannot write on company time – Define within your company policy or job specifications.
- Stop blogging if we say so
- Contact PR - If a member of the media contacts you about a Company related blog posting or requests information of any kind, contact PR.
Tags: employee policy, job description, social media, twitter