Creating a Social Media Policy :: #PRCA3030


P6033675 by afsart.

Due: April 28 by 11:59pm in GeorgiaVIEW

Worth: 200 points

For the final project in PRCA 3030, students have the option of creating their own Social Media Resume or writing a Social Media Policy for a client organization. This blog post describes the Social Media Policy assignment.

The Process

Using the Policy Tool for Social Media, a free service of PolicyTool.net, create a Social Media Policy for your client. (Choose your own client.) In order to do this, you will make and justify several decisions, including the following questions (taken directly from Policy Tool for Social Media):

  • Who can use social media in your company?
  • Must employees obtain permission from someone to use social media?
  • May employee login ID’s or user names include the [“Organization Name”] without approval?
  • Are there certain well known employees who must follow these rules even for personal social media?
  • Are there any ethical standards that your employees must normally follow for publishing or commentary?
  • Do you offer internal assistance in setting up social media accounts and settings?
  • Must the user’s social media profiles be consistent with [“Organization Name”] website or publications?
  • Must official corporate photos be used for profile photos?
  • Should the employee include a disclaimer stating that they are not speaking on behalf of the company?
  • Do you want to add tips for successful use of social media that are helpful, but not strictly speaking required for a policy?

At each stage of the creation process in the Policy Tool for Social Media, you are asked to make a decision about the above questions. For each decision you make, provide a paragraph or so description of how you made the decision. You will want to get input from your client, rather than making these decisions in a vacuum. Put these questions and how you arrived at each decision in the Appendix of your paper.

The Paper

Your Social Media Policy Paper will consist of the following:

  • A short description of your client
  • A description of your client’s current involvement in social media (including how leaders & employees in the organization are using social media). See the Social Web Strategy Worksheet (from Chapter 1) on the Resource CD that came with A Survival Guide to Social Media and Web 2.0 Optimization: Strategies, Tactics, and Tools for Succeeding in the Social Web for suggestions of types of social media sites the organization may be involved in.
  • A few paragraphs on the need for a social media policy (for any client, not just this one). Include information on the dangers of NOT having a policy in place.
  • The policy that you create using Policy Tool for Social Media (copy and paste)
  • A recommendation for how to implement the policy in the client organization
  • An appendix, which lists your justification for each of the answers to the policy questions, along with contact information for your client, just in case I have any questions

Remember

If you use information in your paper that you did not write yourself (for example, the client description), it’s critical for you to cite your sources. For the policy portion of your paper, you can simply indicate that you used the Policy Tool for Social Media to create the policy. As is common in our field of study, use APA Style for citations.

Create Your Own Social Media Policy

How do you use social media?

Melanie McBride, a Toronto based writer-aggregator of education, technology, media and culture, wrote:

“Despite the popularity and widespread adoption of social tools, there’s little agreement when it comes to matters of our individual terms of use. Without a collective social contract for social media, many of us are left wondering: How do I define my own social policy? Until now, corporate social media developers are defining those policies for us. Some of us feel it’s time we defined social media according to our our own terms.

McBride posted a template, and encouraged her readers to “[Steal This] Personal Social Media Policy.” Since she has this licensed under Creative Commons, I’m sharing it with you here.

I challenge all users of social media, especially PR students, to adapt this template and create their own social media policies.

MY SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY

[a work in progress]

1. Connecting: Introduce yourself and tell me why you want to connect

[Would you like an introduction from new follows? Would you like them to answer a particular question about their interest in connecting? Define it here]

2. Follow, add, friend: [your subhead here]

[Your polices around friending, following and adding. For example, if people follow/friend you do you automatically reciprocate? Or do you prefer to evaluate the value of a contact over time? State it here, loud and clear]

3. Privacy, boundaries and safety: [your subhead here]

[Define your privacy/boundaries for friends, coworkers and family. Everybody has different ideas about what’s “too much information.” Friends, family and business associates have different ideas about who you are. While you may not be able to control what’s said about you, you can certainly ask your network to be mindful of your limits]

4. Signal to noise: [your subhead here]

[Do you have any strong feelings about the kind of social media experience you seek (or don’t)? For example, do you have a problem with people using RSS in their Twitter? Do you get annoyed by multiple status updates? Make that clear here (so people aren’t surprised when you unfollow them – or vice versa)]

5. Personal data and sharing: [your subhead here]

[What’s all this sharing about? (for you) Are you looking to connect more deeply according to shared interests, ideologies, professional goals?]

6. My networking needs and uses: [subhead here]

[How is your use of Facebook different from your use of Linkedin different from your use of Twitter different from your use of MySpace? What are your specific networking purposes or goals for each?]

7. Your criteria here: [subhead here]

[your policy, feelings, arguments here]

8. Your criteria here: [subhead here]

[your policy, feelings, arguments here]


Photo Credit: The Conversation Prism, o
riginally uploaded to Flickr by b_d_solis