Steps to Create a Social Media Ethics Policy
Every Business Should Have a Social Media Policy
This is not my advice; it comes from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It is also a smart business practice.
One aspect of the FTC guidelines explains why every business, for-profit, nonprofit, educational, faith based, and others, should have a social media policy. “This is to protect the business and to help insure there is proper disclosure for consumers.”
The guidelines make it very clear:
1. You will require disclosure and truthfulness in social media posts about your business by anyone connected to your business.
2. You will create a social media policy and train employees and stakeholders.
3. You will monitor social media conversations about your business and correct mistakes when proper disclosure does not happen.
If your business does not take these steps, your business can be 100-percent liable for missteps.
This means that businesses should:
1. Create the policy.
2. Train current employees, board members, vendors, marketing partners, volunteers, and others so they understand the social media policy.
3. Train new employees, board members, vendors, marketing partners, volunteers, and others so they understand the social media policy.
4. Have appropriate people in leadership accountable for making sure the policy is followed.
So perhaps by now you are asking what is the difference between a “guide” and the “law?” Here is what the FTC says:
“Guides are administrative interpretations of laws administered by the Commission. Although guides do not have the force and effect of law, if a person or company fails to comply with a guide, the Commission might bring an enforcement action alleging an unfair or deceptive practice in violation of the FTC Act.” (DiResta 2013)
Bottom Line: Create a Social Media Ethics Policy and Train Your Staff or You Place Your Business or Organization at Risk
Using social media and asking employees to participate can be a powerful marketing tool. Executives like Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, require their new employees to take social networking classes during onboarding. Dell has even developed a brand community to foster employee and customer advocacy on social media (Pollitt 2013).
How should you proceed?
Step one: Define your goals.
Step two: Know which platforms you want to use and why. (This should be based on research knowing where your current and potential customers have conversations.)
Step three: Get into action now!
Think of a social media policy as a code of conduct. It helps employees and stakeholders know the do’s and don’ts of posting. One expert explains the reasoning for a social media policy this way: “A social media policy defines your team’s roles, rules and responsibilities and establishes guidelines to communicate consistently. It also lets your team know how to prevent or respond to a crisis.” (Demetrio 2013)
A social media guide can benefit your organization in many ways, but most importantly, it can contribute to
1. Providing structure for employees
2. Protecting your brand and business
3. Educating and guiding employees to being “ambassadors”
4. Creating value for the organization as employees know the right way to act, which reflects positively on the brand
5. Showing you are a modern and transparent company (mindjumpers.com 2013)
Less Is More: Creating a Social Media Policy Should Not Become an Exercise in Complexity
I was once sitting at a meeting in Seattle of corporate compliance officers and human resource executives from some of the nation’s biggest businesses. In chatting with a compliance officer sitting next to me (for a global company), I asked her about their social media policy.
She told me it was in process and up to 300 pages. I was aghast! “Three hundred pages” I said. “No one will read or remember 300 pages!”
I went on to help her understand that whether an employee is 18 years old or 40 years old, a social media policy should be straightforward, simple, and easily remembered; and that you cannot anticipate every possibility.
That is what this chapter is about, helping you understand how to create a social media policy that will help conform to the FTC guidelines, give your employees and stakeholders guidance, and help protect your reputation, whether you are an individual, for-profit, nonprofit, educational, or faith-based organization.
An excellent source for creating a social media policy can be found at this website: socialmedia.org/disclosure. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Attribute it to SocialMedia.org and link to www.socialmedia.org/disclosure.” (SocialMedia.org 2014)
Here you will find several pages (in Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF format) of boilerplate that allow virtually any business or organization to cut, paste, and create a social media policy. You will find templates for employees, board members, vendors, bloggers, and many more. Use these; they are invaluable. Credit should be given to Andy Sernovitz, the author of the book Word of Mouth Marketing and the person behind SocialMedia.org.
As outlined by Andy and his team, you will find the scenarios addressed in these templates include the following:
• Disclosure of Identity
• Personal and Unofficial Social Media Participation
• Social Media Outreach Campaigns
• Truthfulness
• Advocacy Programs
• Compensation and Incentives
• Agency and Contractor Disclosure
• Vendor Questionnaire
• Monitor and Respond
• Policies and Training
• Creative Flexibility
• General Best Practices
Key: The Policy Is Constantly Evolving
It is important to understand that when you create a social media policy, it should be a living, evolving document.
Why is it so important to create the policy for your organization? Enlisting the help of employees and stakeholders to share stories of your brand is a powerful marketing tool, if used correctly. In addition, the FTC has made it clear that the best way to protect your company from legal trouble is by establishing formal disclosure policies for your staff, agencies, and subcontractors (SocialMedia.org 2014).
How complicated is it to use these templates to create a social media policy? It should not be that complicated or that time-consuming. I have used the templates and they are very simple to tailor for any business or organization.
While Chief Marketing Officer for a major nonprofit organization in Seattle with 26,000 members and thousands more as volunteers, I used these templates to create a social media policy that would address employees, members, volunteers, board members, and vendors. By using the templates, I created the policy in two weeks and then did training sessions for employees and volunteers.
Who should be trained? Employees, volunteers, board members, vendors, marketing partners, and yes interns.
Start early. At Unisys, new hires are briefed on social media policies practically before the ink on their contracts is even dry. It is literally one of the steps necessary to activate new hires’ employment (Meister 2012).
At Sprint, the social media-training brand is called Sprint Ninja. Sprint employees who complete the Sprint Social Media Ninjas program complete a two-hour workshop to receive their Ninja certificate (Meister 2012).
When training, use clear examples to help stakeholders understand what you are describing. Examples of proper and improper Facebook posts, tweets, blog posts, and so on, will help team members understand exactly what your expectations are.
Ask questions, engage, and make sure people in training sessions understand. This is not about distributing a policy memo, it is about helping stakeholders and employees understand what is proper and improper. Use simple terms and help people understand why there is a policy and what is at stake.
According to Eric Tung writing in SocialMediaExaminer.com (Tung 2014), “Social media policies must meet company and legal requirements, but should include open opportunities for employees to support your social media efforts.” (Tung 2014)
He goes on to say, “Research shows that a majority of employees are willing to share company information—they’re just not sure what to share because they don’t want to get in trouble.” (Tung 2014)
Among the nine components of a good policy, Tung advocates some important points:
• Does the company want multiple policies to address various departments and networks; one combined detailed policy; or one general policy to apply to the company as a whole?
• Navigating how state and federal laws affect your company’s social media policy takes time, but it is imperative. You do not want to be fined for not abiding by the law. Research the NLRB and other federal labor laws that may protect social media posts. Some states have enacted laws that prohibit employers from requesting usernames or passwords. (Tung 2014)
Here are some questions you may have about policies and practices:
1. Can I use a #hashtag as disclosure?
a. The FTC has not specifically said hashtag use would or would not make a disclosure compliant; however, as we have covered in Chapter 3, there have been cases in which the FTC fined businesses citing the fact that specific #hashtags did not constitute disclosure.
2. Can I say the word “Ad” at the start of a post and comply with disclosure rules?
a. The FTC has stated that disclosure must be clear and conspicuous so consumers clearly understand what they are reading. The key in this example is whether the consumer clearly understands he or she is being “sold to” before reading or taking action to purchase. (Tung 2014)
Key Point: FTC regulations have traditionally been associated with advertising. However, the federal government makes no distinction between PR and advertising. In this age of strategic communication, PR practitioners have to be aware of all social media regulations. Given that social media management is increasingly under the purview of public relations, knowing these regulatory boundaries are important for all PR firms, departments, and practitioners.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) has been among those working to clarify the FTC’s disclosure guidelines.
In 2013, attorney Anthony DiResta posted a lengthy article on the WOMMA website, explaining the Dot Com Disclosure guidelines.
In DiResta’s comments, he stated as follows:
“Twitter: The bottom line for the FTC is that consumers need to understand the indicator, be it #ad or something else, and be aware that it means that the message is a sponsored endorsement. An advertiser is only responsible for the message that it sends or that are sent by its agents.” (DiResta 2013)
“Instagram: If a picture such as one posted to Instagram or Pinterest makes a claim about a product, it may require a disclosure. The key is how the consumer will understand the picture. If consumers would understand a picture to be an endorsement of a commercial product by, say, a celebrity who uses Instagram, then a disclosure would be necessary.” (DiResta 2013)
“Hyperlinks: The issue of when hyperlinks can be effective in meeting FTC disclosure requirements is an important one. In evaluating the effectiveness of hyperlink disclosures, the language of the label of the hyperlink is critical. When a consumer clicks on a link, he or she should be taken directly to the necessary disclosure information. The consumer should not have to click a hyperlink and then navigate to another page or search through distracting information on the page to read the disclosure.” (DiResta 2013)
What Does a Sample Policy Look Like?
SocialMedia.org’s Three Guides for Safe Social Media Outreach summarizes the fundamental obligations required for marketers to stay safe:
1. Require disclosure and truthfulness in social media outreach.
2. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements.
3. Create social media policies and training programs.
The FTC has also made it clear that the best way to protect your company from legal trouble is by establishing formal disclosure policies for your staff, agencies, and subcontractors.” www.socialmedia.org/disclosure
Summary
In this chapter, I have explained how to write a social media ethics policy and strongly suggested you use the templates provided at www.socialmedia.org/disclosure.
SocialMedia.org’s Disclosure Best Practices Checklist 1: Disclosure of Identity
The following is from SocialMedia.org’s disclosure toolkit. This is just one of several toolkit pages available for your use under Issued under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License (www.socialmedia.org/disclosure)
Focus: Best practices for how employees and agencies acting as official corporate representatives disclose their identity when using social media.
When communicating via social media on behalf of our company or on topics related to the business of our company, we will
1. Disclose who we are, who we work for, and any other relevant affiliations from the very first encounter.
2. Disclose any business/client relationship if we are communicating on behalf of another party.
3. Ensure that all disclosure meets the minimum legal standard by being (a) clear and conspicuous, (b) understandable by the average reader, and (c) clearly visible within the relevant content.
4. Require all employees to disclose their employer when using social media to communicate on behalf of the company or about company-related topics.
5. Make certain that disclosure is sufficient so that the average reader understands that our company is responsible for the content, while they are reading the content.
6. Comply with all laws and regulations regarding disclosure of identity.
7. Properly use pseudonyms and role accounts:
• (Option A) Never use a false or obscured identity or pseudonym.
• (Option B) If aliases or role accounts are used for employee privacy, security, or other business reasons, these identities will clearly indicate the organization represented and provide means for two-way communications with that alias.
8. Provide a means of communicating with our company in order to verify our involvement in a particular item of social media content.
9. Instruct all employees, agencies, and advocates with whom we have a formal relationship on these disclosure policies and require them to comply.
The following is from SocialMedia.org’s disclosure toolkit. This is just one of several toolkit pages available for your use under Issued under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. (www.socialmedia.org/disclosure)
Focus: Best practices for employees who talk about company-related issues at any time in their personal social media participation.
For personal social media interactions:
1. If employees write anything related to the business of their employer on personal pages, posts, and comments, they will clearly identify their business affiliation.
2. The manner of disclosure can be flexible as long as it is (a) clear and conspicuous, (b) understandable by the average reader, and (c) clearly visible within the relevant content. (e.g., disclosure methods could include usernames that include the company name, or a statement in the post or comment itself, “I work for __<company>__ and this is my personal opinion.”)
3. Employees will specifically clarify which post or comments are their own opinions vs. official corporate statements.
4. Writing that does not mention work-related topics does not need to mention the employment relationship.
5. If employees post or comment anonymously, they should not discuss matters related to the business of their employer. If employer-related topics are mentioned, they should disclose their affiliation with the company.