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.

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.