The only Social Media Policy you need
Don’t crap on the hand that feeds you.
Of course the more “polite version” is don’t bite the hand that feeds you, but I think mine has a nicer ring to it.
This applies to most social platforms as well. In many respects it comes down to treating your audience as you want to be treated audience may not necessarily be customers but could simply be people that you follow the public you want to follow of people that you interact with other casual basis.
In this day and age there is a good chance that somebody further up the food chain than you in your organisation is either going to be following you directly or have access to the material you have written through some means. There doesn’t have to be anything nefarious in those means, it is just an is these days. Say you’re having a bad day at work complaining loudly about your organisation will get you noticed in a way that you would necessarily be comfortable with.
That is not to say you cannot complain about your work but do it in such a way that you don’t bring your organisation into disrepute without realising it may be consequences for you.
Even if you only use Social Media for social interaction and have nothing to do with any job in any way what so ever, the hand that feeds you is your followers. The relationship you have with them will define which part of crapping on the hand that feeds you something falls into. I follow lots of people who’s material is not fit for work, or even for re tweeting for example.
If you use Twitter for incessantly tweeting about competitions inherently lowering your chance of winning a competition like all pyramid schemes you’re going to annoy lot of people. If you consider having your timeline full competitions don’t expect the a lot of followers and certainly very little conversation, then go ahead. If you are a company getting people to re-tweet your competition, you’re going to damage your brand not improve it doing this. Why because your brand will be associated with the incessant re-tweeting as well as the person doing the re-tweeting.
Whether we like it or not our personal lives and our personal interactions on social media will come back to within the workplace at some point in time. How these interactions affect us at work or even at home depend on how we conduct ourselves.
There are plenty of cases of people overstepping the boundaries in some cases it may well have been deliberate or a one off the error of judgement. But in all these cases it still comes back to level of personal responsibility and personal judgement. If you can justify through your history on social media that you haven’t broken the rules as a standard practice you may find yourself in a lot better place if you do overstep a boundary.
For an organisation the audience are all potential customers and while some organisations embrace social media and the opportunities that it presents many worry about the risks outweigh the benefits. There is not to say that social media is a panacea for every company and their woes. There are though are lots of opportunities to be had. In this case the hand that feeds you is easy to define and the risks of making a mistake is somewhat higher. However like above if you establish the history a single mistake can be overlooked or addressed quickly and easily.
The harder part of this policy is the common sense aspect. People are going to complain. You need to work out if your behaviour is something that is worth complaining about. People said I posted to many photos in one go, and guess what they were right I did. So I tweak the Twitterfeed to reduce the volume. Problem solved, this had nothing to do with work, but I took my followers as a hand that feeds me. When I had a bad few days at work with general stress, I just jumped of twitter for a while. I happen to like where I work and having a bad few days wasn’t going to change that. Bitching on Twitter would have.
So next time you are having a bad day, somebody has annoyed you, got under your skin, or just even themselves being an idiot, consider your response. Is your response going to crap on the hand that feeds you. Really it isn’t that hard!
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