Social Media Guidelines & Employees

I am currently writing the social media guidelines for the Van Marcke Group of Companies and the exercise takes me back to the time when I was working at IBM and part of the "New Media Team"...

Must have been end 2004, beginning 2005 when the draft guidelines at IBM where put on a wiki and opened up for "review" by the employees.

I still think this was a very good idea and definitely added to the human voice in which the guidelines are written.

For the guidelines I am currently writing I have done some research online because let's face it, since 2005 a lot of things have changed...

So here are a couple of resources which I think are very valuable if one day you need to do the same exercise for your company or organisation:

• The IBM Social Media Guidelines - I always go back to them because I do think they were one of the first and one of the best and still are...
• The by now famous "Laurel Papworth List" - Laurel did a great job collecting about 40 corporate guidelines in one list.
• And then there is another reference I always turn to; the "blogging policy" list on the New PR Wiki. The title of the wiki page shows that time goes by fast - in 2005 it was all about "blogs"...

The aspects I took into consideration while writing ?

Well, the guidelines need to be clear, straightforward and direct. They also need to be written for the employees in the first place...

Avoid any legal terminology and above all else I tried to use "common sense" (we say "boerenverstand" here in Dutch) wherever possible.

Employees are sensible, intelligent people otherwise you wouldn't have hired them, so don't get all paranoid about these things.

But still, this week I did a quick 3 day poll via Twitter and got the following results when I asked;

"Do you think employees should be involved in the development & drafting of the social media guidelines of the company ?"

What do you think...?