Tone Deaf
Have you thought about the tone of your social media policy? It might seem trivial, but your policy should strive to be helpful, encouraging and optimistic. You want to send a message that your agency is not against social media — instead you recognize the tremendous value in these tools and want to be consistent and treat everyone fairly.
Excluding Elected Officials
Many policies cover employee use of social media, but leave out language pertaining to elected officials. Many elected officials want to embrace social media to better communicate with constituents, but some have indeed exercised bad social media judgment.
Dated Upon Rollout
A sure way to ensure your social media policy is outdated almost immediately upon rolling it out is to specifically reference platforms and strategies.
While it’s important to broadly define social media terminology to ensure that everyone reading the policy is speaking the same language, the fact is that platforms change all the time. You do not want your policy to require updating and the lengthy approval process that can come along with it, every time a new Snapchat or Vine is introduced. Instead, define broad terms such as microblog, social network, video sharing platform, etc.
Social Media Policy FrameworkReferences References overlap with other policies Definitions Broadly define social media terminology Responsibilities Who is responsible for what Procedures Typically the lengthiest section
|
Keeping it Under Wraps
Many public agencies do not typically make their internal policies available to the public. But make an exception for the social media policy and publish it in its entirety on your official government website. Going further, extract the portion of the policy that deals with comments and monitoring and publish a hyperlink to this section on key public areas like social media profile descriptions. This simplifies your policy for citizens because they will be able to easily find the portion that pertains to them.
There are several other important components to a good social media policy, but these four approaches should not be overlooked.
This article was originally published by Government Technology.