Social Media Employee Policy Examples from Over 100 Organizations

Dr. Hansjörg Leichsenring said:

Great list. Thanks. Are there any examples for banks publicly available?

Kind regards from Germany

Hansjörg

Actively Social said:

Thanks for all the examples! Great post!

RalphPaglia said:

Blogger's Note
The blog post above should contain the following additional content and information designed to supplement the table in the post, which as Courtney Hunt points out, can be seen in original context within the SMT guidance section at http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php 

Following content was intended to be in this post:

Personally and professionally, I like the Policy Tool for Social Media available at  http://SocialMedia.PolicyTool.net for creating dealership and dealer group social media employee policy documentation, but for many people it is often useful to see what companies outside the car business do for given situation.

The following table contains the names of over 100 companies and organization that have published their Employee Social Media Policies or Guidelines online... The left side column is the name of the organization, and it is linked to their organizational or corporate home page. The right side column displays a link to the actual document of policy web page for you to either download or review.  I found the information in the table shown at the Social Media Today website, which is a great reference site and resource for automotive marketing professionals looking for guidance and best practices regarding the use of Social Media to sell more cars, parts and service business."

The logo image below is linked to the Social Media Policy web application that I frequently ask clients to use:

Courtney Hunt said:

basebot said:

Ralph

Thanks for posting this - a fascinating collection. Being a smaller company - just over 50 employees - we do not go to such length. I do not have time [clearly] to read all of the docs you have generously listed, but I am willing to bet that our socail media guidelines are the most succinct. We simply say: "Be on brand, be interesting".

We have documented what our brand values are elsewhere - and they include ideas of responsibility etc – so we saw no need to re-iterate it for social media. People know what we are about. What we wanted to do was to liberate staff to talk on behalf of the company. We can trust them to do it in real life, so we saw no reason not to trust them online.

Is this naive? Or is this kind of approach necessary if we are to avoid stifling individual personality? There is a sliding scale with complete censorship at one end and blind irresponsibility at the other. Where do we need to be?

kellybriefworld said:

Every business would benefit from having a social media policy in place, but it should not be an all or nothing approach. Instead of having a policy in place that blocks social media completely or doesn’t block social media at all and expects employees to follow policy rules, why not block some pieces of social media and keep some parts of social media accessible? Social media is growing in the business world and companies would be missing out on its benefits if it is blocked entirely. Palo Alto Networks might have found a solution to this problem, they have a new software that has the ability to do thing such as a read-only facebook. I think companies could really benefit from something like this, what do you think? Here's a link to new whitepapers they have created:http://bit.ly/d2NZRp http://bit.ly/bsrh9CFacebook