Following on from my recent presentation and blog post on Keeping your powder dry: marketing within compliance, a key part of working ‘around’ compliance (in a good way!) is to ensure you approach your social media policy in the right way…
The key thing to remember in all communications is that ambiguity helps no one. The truth will out, so don’t deliberately confuse. And if it is unintentional confusion, no good will come out of that either! It’s about being clear and not misleading. These are the same guidelines for social media – whether using it among a business audience or a consumer audience. Social media does not change the rules of honesty.
It’s about context and integrity…
With your social media strategy in mind, you need to provide context to your staff; regardless of their position in the organisational structure – or even if they’re volunteers. Context very often provides an instinctive understanding in people as to how social media is being used, so the policy or guidelines become a reference point.
I’ve often said it’s about looking for the similarities in sectors and companies, not the differences between them. We can learn so much from how others do things and regarding social media policies, we can even learn from the largest consumer product in the world and the largest national supermarket chain… Both Coca Cola and Tesco have simplified their social media policies to such an impressive level, considering their sizes and the levels of risk they are potentially facing on a day to day basis!
How Coca Cola and Tesco approach their social media guidelines and how it relates to you…
Make it effective; keep it simple
This is a very brief overview of how these to branded giants have approached their social media management, but if you’d like more details on their two policies, let us know and we’ll send something across to you.
It really is about simplifying everything! The more rules and pages you write, the less likely staff are to read them… Honestly. And it can also curb creativity. Give people guidelines and context and they will fly! A social media policy-literate workforce is a naturally compliant one, but in order for it to be efficient, it needs to be simple and staff need to be engaged.
As I’ve said before, the best question to ask when developing a social media policy is How do we make this work…?
If you need help working out how you make this work, gives us a call and we’d be delighted to help.
