WHAT IS YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY?

Anyone who uses a company called 4Imprint for their promotional products will likely have received one of their ‘Blue Papers’ recently which spoke to the idea that a company should have a social media policy in place. That got me thinking.

Have you ever thought about creating a social media policy for yourself, for your own company, for your own family (especially your kids)? What should it contain? What shouldn’t it contain? Do you even need one? Well, let’s look at why I believe you definitely need one both corporately and personally. For the corporate angle, you should visit www.4imprint.com and scroll through their site and at the bottom you will find a link to all of their ‘Blue Papers’. IF you do that, you will quickly understand why it is that they are the company that I use for all of my promotional products because they exemplify the “wow” experience in dealing with them.

Ok, so what about a personal social media policy. Let’s start by looking at why I believe you definitely need to have one in place. In today’s world with so many of us conversing using the various social sites, from Facebook to Twitter to PInterest, if you simply go on and post without thought then you may one day pay the price. This does not mean that you should abstain from partaking (unlike some other taboos), no you should embrace the media 100%. A personal social media policy would be more of a set of guidelines to employ so that you do not end up having a compromising picture go viral, lose your job and then have a lot of trouble getting a new one. It is one thing if someone else takes a picture and posts it on the Internet, it is another thing altogether if the profile picture you have involves you with a whiskey bottle looking like a new appendage growing out of your mouth and a caption that announces what a party it was.

Is this enough to get you fired, not likely? Is it enough to prevent you from being hired? It most definitely is despite the recent suggestion that it is illegal for a prospective employer to look you up.
So taking care in what you put out for the world to see forever and ever should involve some simple guidelines so you reduce, if not eliminate, the potential for an unwelcome problem.

The following are a few questions to answer when you sit down to create your own guidelines:
1. Does your public persona matter to you – either personally or corporately?
2. Does the public persona matter to your employer?
3. If you stumble upon something forty years from now, are you going to be embarrassed if your grandchild is the one who helps you stumble on it?
4. What are your core more and ethical values?

With the above, it should get you thinking about how you want to be seen by the world. I remember many years ago my younger son said to me that he wanted to get a mohawk and dye it blue. I suspect he may have been testing me for my reaction. Rather than tell him are you crazy, I asked him if he thought people, like his teachers, saw him as a good person and he said yes. Then I said to him that unfortunately when you have something like a mohawk most people will prejudge you and could think you are a bad kid when you are not and when they have not taken the time to get to know you. He never did get his hair cut that way – thankfully. Your identity on the Internet is similar in that you may not have a chance to explain that you are really a good kid despite your blue mohawk hairdo.

Now that you have figured out why you need a social media policy personally, it is time to think about what some of your guidelines might involve or not involve:
1. No pictures of when you are intoxicated
2. No Tweets or posts after 11 pm is a common one as it is said that nothing good can be posted or tweeted after that time
3. Can anyone anywhere be offended by what you are saying
4. Would your mother or your granddaughter be offended
5. Can you share it in another equally as effective way
6. Have you attempted to make the information as private as possible through the site options
7. Is it illegal

I believe it was either Aristotle or Socrates who said not to tell if: (1) telling me will not make a difference in my life positively; (2) telling me will hurt anyone or anything; and (3) you will gain from this at the another’s expense.

So when you sit down later to post, think about what it is that you are posting and what you have posted. If it does not smell right – then it is not.