Welcome to the Melcrum Social Media Newsletter

In our recent global survey on social media and corporate communications, over 70 percent of respondents stated their organization had no guidelines in place for employees to blog or use social media tools – either inside or outside of the work place.

Where should you start the development of guidelines?

In the world of corporate blogging specifically, there are two organizations that stand out from the rest – IBM and Sun Microsystems. Both companies have several thousand employee bloggers and have published robust guidelines that are freely available to view on the web:

IBM
Sun Microsystems

These guidelines can be seen as the “gold standard” with both companies well advanced in their blogging programs.

What are some of the things to consider when developing such guidelines? Here are three fundamental points:

1. Trust your employees
Don’t be draconian. Employees are trusted to work for your organization, spend its money, represent it at conferences and functions and interact with a wide range of people in their daily lives, so why not trust them with something as simple as blogging and give as much freedom as you can.

2. Give employees input with guidelines
Don’t force a policy on social media on to your employees. If you’re genuinely sure you want to start blogging and giving employees a voice within the company, get input from those same employees on what they feel would be fair and suitable and craft the policy with them.

3. Consider your existing policy
Of course, you may look at your existing employee contractual guidelines and consider them to be suitable. After all, the key thing is simply asking your employees not to break the usual rules about disclosures, behaviors and so on.

Successes with guidelines
According to Simon Phipps, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems’ blogging program, with more than 4,000 employee bloggers  (over 10 percent of the workforce) they’ve yet to have anyone disciplined for breaching policy.


Best wishes,

Alex Manchester,
Editor
alex.manchester@melcrum.com



P.S. Don't miss the Social Media Forum for Internal Communicators, Wednesday 21st & Thursday 22nd March 2007, Hilton Canary Wharf, London. There are only a few places still available so book yours today!

Further FREE reading from Melcrum:

• How does our blog measure up?
  
  
• Skills of the future
  
  
• Are you reading your employees accurately?