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LINES IN THE SAND
There are a lot of policies being written about social media by people who have little experience of using the tools and whose main interest is to control the use of them. Write enabling rules instead. Writing rules that make it easier to do the right thing is the way to influence behaviour.
Rules. To have them or not to have them? I worry when corporations start their social media efforts with writing rules – often before they really understand what they are writing rules about. It is a bit like writing the manual for running before you have learned to walk. I guess it stems from the paranoia that exists about what will happen when you give staff the ability to speak for themselves in a public forum. Without rules won’t they run amuck? But isn’t it funny how it’s always someone else who will misbehave? Look at email. Everyone rants about email but it is always other people’s misbehaviour that is identified as the problem. Rule making is often a projection of one group’s worst expectations onto other people. The chaos they anticipate without rules very, very rarely comes to pass. Your biggest problem is not that people are going to behave like idiots but that they get so scared of breaking a rule that they end up saying nothing!
If you are going to have rules make sure they are enabling rules. Avoid language like “policy” or “rules” and prefer instead the sort of language used by the US Military with their Social Media Handbook. Make sure that your handbook ...
