What are the three elements every social media policy needs to convey? Purpose, policies and procedures.
Last post I covered the first part of policies--the
Guiding Principles, which come from your purpose statement. Next, we break down the Guiding Principles into
Rules of Engagement.
Here's where the particular meat and potatoes of your organization’s policy needs to be communicated.
1. Proprietary Information & Confidentiality: Nuts and bolts use of photos, logos, news stories, links, video, podcasts, etc. Citation. Also, a stern statement here about confidentiality of internal information. Make it known what is and isn’t acceptable in specific language. You may want to have a discussion about affiliations—are you going to allow affiliations outside the department/university to be present in your social media? Also, never comment on anything legal or litigation the department is involved in.
2. Accuracy and Clarity: Don’t link to anything you haven’t thoroughly read or to sites you don’t trust. During the men’s NCAA basketball tourney, I followed a bunch of people on Twitter for info, one of whom was a “sort of” expert in the field of men’s hoops. One of his tweets was just one word—the “F” bomb. After that, I never re-tweeted anything he posted or referred to anything he had said publicly. Make sure your facts and URLs are accurate. As John Wooden said, “be quick, but don’t hurry.” Hurrying can lead to mistakes that might hang you eventually.
Don’t lie. Don’t use jargon--please, don’t use jargon that only a handful of people would understand. Remember, you want to look at what you are doing from the audience’s point of view. Will they feel comfortable and welcomed on your sites? Speak conversationally. Remember, you’re not speaking at people, but with people.
3. Disclosure & Transparency: Managers must ID themselves on their account. It should be up front and noticeable--maybe on profile or front page. If more than one person is using the account, identify them as administrators and use an ID tag system to ID posts. Style and guidelines should be available from the SM Manager. Again, see
Toyota's twitter feed for a good example of this.
Transparency is a trickier subject. I would suggest that you make it clear in this section, that the purpose of social media is to foster a conversation. Tell posters to be clear if they have a vested interest in a subject they are posting about (fund raising, ticketed events, etc.). Be clear on who you are and how you are affiliated. Don’t lie, don’t give too much information, don’t say, you don’t know (say you’ll find out).
Remember that you are dealing with personal lives of young people--the student-athletes. Ever heard of FERPA? If not, maybe a reference to some policy here. I would make it a policy to never talk about student-athletes unless it is in relation to some accomplishment or award.
4. Good Sportsmanship: Businesses may call this section Diplomacy, but I think sportsmanship is a word our world relates to better. Don’t talk about internal matters in your department or anyone else’s department. Practice generosity. Find something good to say, or don’t say it. Don’t bash the competition, the conference, the NCAA, your community, etc. Politics and religion should be off limits. Don’t gender bash—sometimes this happens inadvertently in the world of athletics. If in doubt, have them ask SM Manager. Common sense and common courtesy.
5. Disclaimers: Make it clear on the profile page or home page that these are the posters' opinions, not necessarily those of the department. This is also a good place for a posting policy for fans, something a lot of sites have. It doesn’t give you latitude to delete posts, but gives fans an idea what is acceptable and helps the community self-police.
6. Respect in the "Social Media Space" and Reputation Management:
• Make it clear you want to advance conversation in a meaningful way. Don’t pick fights or engage in them.
• Answers questions—don’t broadcast your opinions in answers to questions. Don’t promote products as a sidebar to question-answering.
• Respect people’s opinions. If you have a fan message board, you may want to take a look at it. Take note of the volume of some of the conversations. What posts look respectful to you? Which ones are disrespectful? Now, look at some fan Facebook pages. Do you notice a difference in tone? You want your sites to be respectful, not bastions of anonymous finger pointing session. You can create that culture by how you foster conversations.
• Do not post anything you wouldn’t say at a public meeting or that you wouldn’t say to the media. Of course, some people may need some coaching here. Appropriate speech, especially in an athletic department, is sometimes open to debate. Informal conversations can give birth to quotes you'd like to take back. Be careful.
• Absolutely, do not have people posting randomly about matters that relate to matters that affect the department’s reputation. This could be internal or external information. Everyone with a department account, should be aware of that line—draw it in the training sessions. If you dismiss a coach, other staff members should not be posting their opinions. Make sure you have a good reputation management strategy in place.
You better have a discussion internally about whether or not you will ever delete a tweet or post of a fan. If you are going to engage in social media, you have to be willing to take the good with the bad. Purpose not to delete posts you "don't agree with" or posts that criticize you. Let the community self-police and answer all legitimate questions. You can't possibly be doing everything perfectly. Let the fans speak to each other, and to you.
Encourage people who have a real beef to contact you personally. And, you can gently remind posters of your posting policies. Graphic language and porn postings should be removed, but make this clear in your posting policies so people know if they indluge in that behavior, their posts will be removed. Tell staffers with personal branding accounts to contact the SM Manager if they have questions about how to deal with negativity on their sites. Coach this in the training as well.
7. Security: Again, remember FERPA. Also, don’t tweet phone numbers, email addresses that aren’t institutional, or any other information that is personal. Give training to your student-athletes about appropriate use of social media (a whole different subject). Student-athletes should not be “friending” media or fans. Facebook accounts should be fan pages and not personal pages. Your guidelines with media should be well-defined with coaches AND media. I don't like the idea of encouraging coaches and media to be "friends" on private social media accounts, but stuff happens. This is particularly problematic on Twitter and FAcebook fan pages where anyone can follow. Also, defer to any institution policies here. Once your policy is set, send it out to the media as well.
Also, I recommend cruising your Twitter account regularly for porn followers. Block these followers--your other followers can see who is following you.
8. Crisis Communications/Emergencies: In the event of a department crisis or emergency—this should be defined by your crisis management plan—social media managers should be given specific instructions about what to post and what not to post. It is better, in these situations, to have coaches and staffers who have personal branding accounts defer to the department feeds. In the event of an emergency, if immediate information needs to be given out—all department accounts should be broadcasting the same information. Give the info (verbatim) to account managers to post and ask them to promote the department feeds that are designated to handle the crisis communications. There should be one voice and one message in a crisis, but it can be broadcast through many channels.
Now, we have looked at the second "P"--
Policies. Can you think of a situation where you would delete a post by a fan on a social media site?
Next Up: The last of the three "P"s of developing a social media policy: Procedures.
Posts
