Our Social Media Policy
Following a PRCA roundtable this morning to discuss Ofcom’s research into social networking, I’m pleased to share a (very draft) version of our new Social Media Policy.
[edit: the "our" in that sentence means "Porter Novelli's"]
You can see a larger version, and download a copy as a PDF or Word Document over here at Scribd. Alternatively, you can click the “enlarge” button (what the orange arrow’s pointing to in the image below).
I’d appreciate as much feedback as possible. It would be nice if you’d share what you have to say (whether positive or negative) in the comment stream below. That way others can see what you’ve said, and build on it. If not, I’m happy to receive anonymous comments by email.
I’d like to say a big thanks to Richard Ellis from the PRCA, and Justin Le Patourel and Sam Carter from Ofcom for putting on a wonderful show this morning.
Hi Mat
Thanks for this. I’ll have a look and feedback comments early next week. Heading off for two day off-site.
Kelly
Hi Mat
Thanks so much for your hospitality today. I read your social media policy with interest, and my initial response is that it is extremely detailed and thoughtful. However, it felt a bit like online PR training. Do you have a similar policy for e-mail, or phones? I rather like the concept that Microsoft have – “blog smart”. Maybe that’s too overly trusting.
I look forward to hearing what others say….
Abigail
Abigail
You know, I think that’s a good point. Most of us with any sense should be saying “it’s just another channel.”
The problem (perhaps) is that it’s a channel with which people have had relatively little experience – both in our own and our clients’ organizations. Inexperience can lead to fear or overconfidence; and both of these lead to mistakes.
We’ve tried to keep the policy bit (section 2) as broad as possible, and to deal with situations and activities rather than specific sites. We want these things to become second nature.
It isn’t “Online PR training” for one very important reason – we’re attempting to teach people that there is no border between the personal (social) and the professional; that – online – they are one person. This isn’t about what they do at work, it’s about what they do in their personal time as well.
This is a tricky area, and I don’t think that we’ve given it nearly as much thought as we should.
Incidentally, while doing the desk research for this project, I looked at ACAS’s Internet and Email Policy. I think ACAS might be an interesting bunch of people to consult on this project!
Thanks for this, very interesting and detailed. I found the meeting fascinating and highly informative – and left feeling a bit of a PR dinosaur! However, that is about to change…
Very interesting, and thanks for sharing it. I think the level of detail is needed actually, and the fact that the policy is a series of ‘guiding principles’ is made clear.
But I also agree with the comment above, that these principles apply to all communications situations – slagging off your agency or client in the pub is as unacceptable as doing it in an online forum (and could be as damaging). A ‘social’ medium is just another environment – is anyone else old enough to remember the Eurostar PR agency reps who were overheard talking about Eurostar’s safety issues by a journalist sitting behind them on the train? Made for interesting headlines the next day.
I think the catch-all is that you ‘should do nothing to bring the agency, or its clients, into disrepute’ in any situation or media, and under that heading come a number of specific guidelines that apply specifically to social media. Maybe the policy is split into two distinct parts (or even policies):
1. using social media on behalf of your clients (blogging etc – the Cillit Bang case is a perfect example!)
2. personal use of social media and its potential impact on reputation, as a sub-head of a more general policy on expected bevahiour.
Kate — you’ve got a point. I like the idea of being that explicit.
I also – with you and Abigail – look forward to a time when we can simply say “use your common sense”, the internet is “just another set of channels” etc.
In the meantime, I think, we need something to make sure that everyone knows what they’re doing.
A policy, on its own, is valueless. However the policy should be the framework for staff training, and a set of standards to which people can refer when they’re making decisions.
This isn’t just something we should be handing out when people join!
Absolutely. We’re considering extending such as policy to clients as well, for their internal use, as part of our consultancy practice. If our job is to manage reputations, we should encourage our clients to start close to home. Reputational damage is as likely to come from within an organisation than from outside.
Well – quite!
The policy is relatively hard to sell as a product, I suspect. What clients should pay for is the internal comms job to make sure that it’s been received and understood.
Very good, thanks for sharing this, Mat. I’m impressed with the emphasis on honesty, and I’ll refer to it as trust, too. Honesty and trust are perhaps the most critical driver of credibility, and what we offer is just that: credibility. Honesty and trust drive confidence, dependability, and faith in a company or product. Both are achieved through honest, ethical, straightforward, consistent, and predictable business practices, and the policy focuses there. Intuitively this makes sense, but surprisingly some don’t get that when asked to flog, we do a disservice to ourselves and the industry. Companies with high levels of trust don’t create blogs pretending to be written by consumers, they don’t “seed” message boards with positive comments supposedly from consumers, and they always present truthful and useful information on their sites. I think that’s what we sell, and are effective when our client’s practice this, as do we. Thanks!
A good and thorough document, but isn’t this a good few years out of date? Most other big global agencies have had policies like this in place for a long time now and have indeed been demonstrably living social media.
Interesting. I can understand the guidelines from Porter Novelli’s point of view and wanting to protect themselves; and there’s not really anything that’s wrong in the content of the guidelines – one can’t really argue with being honest, straightforward and honest online and anywhere else, in life in general.
At the same time, I disagree with the whole thing and several of the points, at least in the first 5 pages displayed here. I guess me disagreeing doesn’t matter given I don’t work for Porter Novelli, nor do I work in PR – but digital marketing, PR and social media really all fall under the same thing and I have a very active life online so I feel it could maybe apply to me in the future. I’m not looking for work, but if I do I’m not interested in applying for Porter Novelli or any other agency that would feel the need to require my agreement to online guidelines, telling me how to talk, write and represent myself – and not the agency I work for – online.
Sure it’s true that the boundaries are between personal and professional life are blurring, but jumping up to the extent of making rules about it feels like getting that bit closer to 1984 or Brave New World. What’s next, the morality or thought police from Fahrenheit 415 or something?
I’m judge of what I write online and on my personal time, not my employer. If a company needs to create guidelines to protect themselves and asks me to state on my blog that these opinions are mine and not those my employer, fair enough. But in at the same time, requesting all your employees to state in their personal space that they are Porter Novelli employees sounds pretty hypocritical.
‘Here are the things you mustn’t do, but we would still like to benefit from the PR of having blogging/twittering/etc employees and have our name fetched by the search engine spiders, so it would be grand if you stick our name up there as much as possible. But don’t lie, that’s bad.’
Everything on the web is public. I know that and being truthful, honest and respectful is my interest anyway, but also for my personal image as much as a company’s. But I will still likely post links somewhere on the web that will be ‘libellous, diffamatory or harassing content, even by way of example or illustration (2.1)’ to someone. I like dark humour and irony, not everyone does.
Anyways, sorry for long diatribe – great if it’s useful to you, otherwise I’ve expressed myself in an honest and respectful way – or at least that’s the intention ;o).
@Dave Which big global agencies have been demonstrably living social media, I wonder? In most cases I’ve come across, a few select individuals from big agencies blog or participate in social media, but mostly from a personal point of view. Again, that’s only what I’ve seen, I don’t pretend to know everything happening online at all.
Very interesting. Must agree with others about some of the overly controlling aspects but i appreciate your willingness to share it as a work in progress and invite debate.
I think there’s a need for a policy while people learn the significance of these channels. Most companies have an email policy (try sending a rude joke to some companies and it’s trapped and bounced). As for phones, well we learnt that etiquette as kids but it wasn’t natural – look up the history of the word “hello” and you’ll find that it was practically unused until adopted and promoted by phone company as the thing to say when you picked up the phone… So guidelines, if not actual rules & policies have thier place.
I’d also be interested to see @dave’s big list of companies who’ve had this for years. Most of the large companies I know still struggle with basic digital comms. Some have had a comitee draw up an Ill-informed and “arse covering” policy for staff’s digital communications but they often just highlights their ignorance of social media and it’s effect on their business.
Thanks for sharing.
Bill Denny, an attorney with Potter Anderson & Corroon will be presenting at the ABA Business Section Spring Meeting at a session entitled “Blah, Blah Blogs: Issues and Policies for the Ways Employees Communicate Online Today.” We would like permission to use a copy of the of your Social Media Guidelines as part of the materials for his session. Can we secure permission to do so? — Cathy
@dave — this draft policy (from July last year) is intended to replace previous policies. We don’t automatically assume that we get things right the first time here! But even if that weren’t the case, I’m sure that you wouldn’t want us to go without a social media policy, for some sour grapes all the other kids have one so we don’t want one reason, or because there’s no longer any news value. That’s not how we work.
No doubt we’ve made mistakes in this policy. That’s why I wanted to publish this here in the first place — to get feedback from some of our peer agencies, and to help other agencies avoid those same mistakes. I can tell you too, from my point of view, that we made several mistakes in the first policy! For one thing, a lot of the focus then was on blogs and blogging. We updated this one to include Facebook. A newer one might include Twitter.
This space changes a lot. While we think the basic premises probably stay the same, a lot of the incidental detail changes, and we need to revisit these documents from time to time to keep them up to date.
Hope this makes sense.
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