Professional Documents
Culture Documents
A SOCIAL
MEDIA POLICY
ByTedJanusz
otzebue, Alaks4 is so close to another continent, politician Sarah palin almost could have been describing it when she said, 'You can actualiy see Russia from land here in Alaskal' It's just above the Arctic Circle and the village has never seen 86 degrees Fahrenheit. Google Maps says there are no roads traversing the 549 miles between it and
gives
ence either
friend or an associate a positive referduringwork hours or on their own time on a social media site such as Linkedln. "It may appear that the company endorses the individual
being recommended," she says. "This
pecially in a far-flung area like ours which needs to reach out to the resr olthe world." the organizer told me.'nVe're justtryingto be proactive." Ifdeveloping a social media policy is ofinterest to a distant fishing village in Alaska, just maybe it should be of interestto your parkingfaciiity as we11.
CreatingYour Social Media Policy Before you think that developing a social
media policy can be about as exciting as finally makingthat long-awaited trip to the dentist for root canal surgery, let me assure you that there is no need to painstakingly desigr-r a social media policy for your parking facility entirely from scratch. To see what other organizations both like and unlike yours have already done, you can visit a website that currently houses about
250 actual social media policies: socialmediagovernance.
Prohibition
"We don't need a social media policyi'you might say. "We just prohibit employees from visiting Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and every other social networking site you discuss in this column that we
happen to come across." Just like Prohibition during the 1920s didn't work in the U.S., neither will blocking all social media sites at the corporate firewall. After all, if your empioyees can't access their favorite Internet locations on their corporate-issued desktops or laptops, they will simply pull out their smartphones and personal tablets to get to those social media sites. Don't believe me? About 150 million users in the U.S. access Facebook so1ely from
com. The owner of the website, Chris Boudreaux, has categorized these sociai media policies into six industry groupings and offers a separate group ofgeneral guidelines and templates as we11. The ohio State University (oSU) Medical Center, in
Baby Boomers," author, and marketing consultant. He is the author of the Soc/a/
Media Marketing
Guide for Parking
ted(@
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Shinder, a former police officer and criminal justice instructor who nowworks as an IT analyst.'You need a social networking policy that explicitly lays out what is and isn't permissible, both on the company's network and outside of it if they are presenting themselves as
representatives of the company." Shinder discusses a situation in which an employee
work-don't."
o J
r*.${ r leii
s.
You'll find many such examples, and it's easy-and smart-to build your policy from there. Take the lead from a remote fishing village, as well as from a small online village of sample social media
policies, and protectl,our
I t
I
*iim or
614.440.7487.
organization.
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