Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Crowdsourcing SMM Voices with Guidelines

For all the strategies that you may put into place to support your SMM voice, you need to do still more. If you’re a large company with hundreds or thousands of employees, you can’t stop your employees from participating in the social web. Just as you cannot stop an employee from talking about your company at a dinner party, you can’t prevent him from talking about you online. That’s not necessarily bad: The more people who know your brand and talk about it favorably, the more it can help you. But it is important to establish some guidelines so that your employees know how to talk about your company online.

Employees care about their companies, and they’ll welcome the guidelines. They’ll see it as a way for them to better represent the company in the public domain — that is, of course, as long as you don’t make the guidelines too restrictive and do incorporate feedback. If you develop the guidelines in isolation from your employees, ignoring how they typically participate online and want to represent your company, you’re sure to face backlash. It is also important to design the guidelines to be adaptable based on how the social web is evolving and how behavior is changing on the different social platforms.

Before you write the guidelines, be sure to check whether your organization has any existing guidelines and policies that can serve as ...