Today, the latest issue of the Northwest Louisiana Business Monthly was published. I am excited to be one of their new contributors. In December, one of the reporters contacted me regarding some social media ideas for this issue. A couple of weeks later there was a local brouhaha at a local TV station over some employees who were fired for disregarding the social media policy for the company. The editor of the NWLA Business Monthly and I met to discuss this, and he asked me to write an article for their January issue. Here is the link to my article in the latest issue. (flip to page 7, or rather printed page 6)

http://issuu.com/dspechtbossier/docs/nbm-january-2013/7

For your convenience, here is the text of my article:

The words you put on the internet have an immediate audience and last forever! It’s not the right place to be caught saying or doing the wrong thing. As a business owner you have a reputation to protect, both online and offline, and you need to be very clear how to handle every kind of communication that concerns your business, including social media.

Several years ago when Facebook’s popularity really exploded, there were lots of stories about employees being fired for saying or doing something on social media that was against their company’s policies. Recently, that story became local. The newspapers, television and social media were a-buzz discussing the event, what role social media played in both the individual’s and the business’ actions, and the right or wrong way the company handled the employee. The story even hit the national news! All this pointed to one thing for me: it’s critically important for your business to have a clearly documented social media policy in place.

Companies typically have some kind of communication handbook that new employees review and sign. A social media policy is just an extension of this. While attorneys still discuss the legal issues surrounding an individual’s right to post in social media, it’s likely that if an employee signs or initials something with guidelines spelled out, that signifies the employee understands and plans to abide by the policy, otherwise suffers the penalties.

Creating a social media handbook, policy or set of guidelines isn’t hard, but you do need to take some time to thoughtfully go through each scenario. To get started, assemble the appropriate people in your business, and start building a document. While not a complete list, here are a few important things to include:

In which social networks are you going to participate?

• Who is responsible for entering the posts?
• Who creates the content to be posted?
• Provide examples of each type of post, who is to respond to them, and how they are to respond. What topics are off-limits?
  • negative comments
  • complaints
  • threats
  • praise
  • questions
  • general conversation
•  How much personal information are employees allowed to share?
•  Guidelines for posting photos, videos, and other links
•  What are the ramifications to inappropriate comments or responses by employees?

Finally, how are you going to roll out your new social media policy? How will you make sure that your employees understand your policies and the subsequent consequences for not following them? Take time now to go through this process so you can avoid the public relations nightmare in the future!