With more and more companies using social media for business, it’s increasingly important for businesses to have a set of guidelines or rules of engagement which can ensure that employees know what to do when interacting online. It’s equally important for managers and superiors to have these guidelines in place, as they may not be accustomed to the style of communication that social media requires. Too often companies jump on board with Twitter or Facebook, using these channels purely to send out marketing messages and press releases. And then they are surprised when the results aren’t there. I ask: “Would you tune into a TV channel that was 100% commercials?” I think not. So it’s no surprise that people are tuning out these constant sales messages.

Here’s my take on the rules of engagement for staff whose job it is to interact with people through social media and online communities. It may be their sole job, or part of their job. My version below is made up in large part from a great O’Reilly article in Forbes and AMP3 PR, who have done a great job in creating a working policy for their own employees – a big shout out to them!

Guidelines for Social Media in the Workplace

We expect everyone who participates in online commentary / social media to understand and to follow these simple but important guidelines. These guidelines cover all social media and online community platforms including but not limited to:

• Social networking (such as Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn)
• Micro-blogging sites (such as Twitter)
• Blogs (including company and external blogs, as well as comments)
• Video/photo sharing sites (such as Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo)
• Online communities (forums, discussion boards)
• Collaborative documents / wikis (such as Wikipedia)
• Review sites (such as Qype, WeLoveLocal)

Social Web Guidelines for Employees

Pick & mix.
Spend some time researching and reading up on various sites before deciding where it makes sense for you to spend the majority of your time online. You can’t be everywhere, so pick sites which rank well and are well-visited by the company’s target audience and/or connected to our core business. Then, feel free to mix in a smaller portion of less-popular sites or blogs when comments or topics warrant it.

Look before you leap.
Read, read and read some more. Learn the landscape and individual style of conversations on that particular site – every site has its own (usually unwritten) rules and quirks. The quickest way to make a fool of yourself or get banned from a site is to dive in without first understanding the lay of the land.

Listen before you talk.
Before entering any conversation, understand the context. Whom are you speaking to? Is this a forum for “trolls and griefers?” Is there a good reason for you to join the conversation? If your answer is yes, then follow these practices when engaging online:

Say who you are.
Always be transparent about who you are and who you represent. Use your real name, identify who you work for and what your role is. You can disclose this on your About page or bio, and please also indicate that your opinions do not represent official positions of the company. If possible, include a link to the company website in this page and/or your signature – but only if this is allowed on that particular site. Use your best judgment to determine when this might be appropriate.

Show your personality.
You weren’t hired to be an automaton. Be conversational while remaining professional. Bring your own personal flavour and experiences to your postings: be YOU first and foremost, and an employee of the company secondly. Part of the whole point in having you communicate online in a work capacity is to provide a real, human face to the business.

Add value, not noise.
Social media is about conversations, personal advice, recommendations and building relationships. It is not a sales channel or means for distributing press releases. Remember the 80/20 rule of thumb: 80% of your conversations should be about general topics relevant to the business and/or your own experiences, only 20% should be about the company’s products or services.

Build a following.
Promote yourself by finding and sharing information that will be interesting to your friends and followers and useful for them to share. Become a trusted part of the online community – not only by creating your own content, but sharing others’. Establish relationships online with other people you respect and trust.

Be responsive.
If someone responds to something you’ve said, be responsive and follow-up quickly. If you say something in error, don’t delete it, simply go back and update it with the correct information.

Know you’re always “On”.
You represent the company at all times and you must assume that your social media usage is visible to customers, managers and prospects. Be careful what and with whom you are sharing. Keep in mind that while we all have the occasional work frustration, Facebook and Twitter are not the best venues in which to air them as those comments are available to your customers and coworkers.

Be respectful.
Respond to ideas, not personalities. Don’t question motives, use profanity or demeaning language, or make remarks that are off topic or offensive. Always demonstrate respect for others’ points of view, even when they’re not offering the same in return. Take the high road: never pick fights and don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to someone’s face and in the presence of others. If you are sharing a negative experience or commenting on a brand or individual, please try to do so in a constructive way.

Don’t expect perfection.
Do expect to make newbie mistakes, and don’t expect everyone to love you. No matter how nice, calm or inoffensive you are, and no matter how much research you do, there will be times when you will trip up and say something unpopular. It’s OK – shake it off and just remember that how you handle this is more important than the misstep itself.

Have full disclosure.
If you are writing an advertorial or other sponsored content – or if you are contracting others to post on the company’s social properties in exchange for money – make sure there’s a clear distinction between the normal / free content and any paid content. Today’s web users are savvy people, and hiding paid activities are a quick way to a bad online reputation.

Know your facts and always give proper credit.
It’s OK to quote others, but never attempt to pass off someone else’s language, photography, or other information as your own. Always give proper attribution (by linkbacks, public mentions, re-tweets and so on). All copyright, privacy, and other laws that apply offline apply online as well. Be sure to credit your sources when posting a link or information gathered from another source.

Think ahead.
Everything you say can (and likely will) be used in the court of public opinion–forever.  Be smart about protecting yourself, your privacy, and the company’s confidential information. What you publish is widely accessible and will be around for a long time so consider the content carefully. Google has a long memory.

Be in it for the long haul.
Don’t expect instant fame, audiences or popularity: building a trusted online presence takes time.

If you respond to a problem, you own it.
If you become the point of contact for a customer or employee complaint, stay with it until it is resolved.

Play nice.
We encourage you to connect with other employees and affiliates online. In doing so, we ask you to remember that sharing personal information about co-workers may affect them inside as well as outside of the office. All standard HR policies apply to interactions between colleagues across the social web.

__________________________

If the above policy is not quite what your own company needs, have a look at this list of social media policies from a huge range of types of organisation, from non-profits through to large corporates. Or indeed check the online database of social media policies.

Twitter users who have custom messages in their Twitter backgrounds are suddenly seeing their messages chopped off or no longer visible at all, thanks to the wider width of the page on the new Twitter layout. The old width of the Twitter page had been static pretty much since day 1, and millions of people customised their page backgrounds accordingly, using the extra space on the sides of the floating content panel to display marketing messages, web addresses, email addresses and more. The new Twitter design being gradually rolled out right now is much wider, meaning many messages and images that were previously visible are no more.

Variable width = 20-67% less visible background messages

To complicate matters further, the width of the new Twitter content panel is now variable depending on what resolution your monitor is set to. Users who have a monitor resolution of 1024 pixels wide (aprox 23% of the population*), can now only see a small 48pixel margin outside the main content panel, meaning any messages are pretty much hidden entirely. Previously, these users could see nearly 3times more of the background image (130 pixels).

A small majority of the population (28%) have their monitors set to 1280 pixel resolution. This is the width that most designers used when creating Twitter background images. They banked on the fact that users would see around 180 – 250 pixels worth of the background, depending on which browser they use, and how it’s set up. The bad news is that Twitter’s new content panel expands to a whopping 1040pixels wide if your monitor is set to 1280 resolution or above. This means that users can now only see a measly 120 pixels of the background image: a reduction of more than half on some browsers. And of course that’s just on one side: while most backgrounds were designed to show messages on the left side only, some clever designers used the right side border to show things, too.

Why did they do that?

I can understand why Twitter have made this move: resolutions are getting higher and higher, and 27% of the population have their monitors set at resolutions higher than 1280 wide. Twitter are designing for the future, when most of us will have high resolutions. But the annoying truth is that today, more than half of the people who view Twitter pages will see a lot less of your pretty custom background than they did before.

So how can I fix my Twitter background image?

What can you do if you are one of the millions who have a custom background that’s no longer being seen by half of your audience? The easiest way to fix (part of) the problem is to simply reduce the scale of your background until your important messages fit within a 120 pixel space on the left. This will mean that the 28% of people who use 1280 as their resolution can see it. Sadly, this doesn’t help the 23% who use 1024 resolution. It’s pretty unlikely that your font size will be visible if you scale down far enough for things to fit within the 48 pixels that 1024 users can see, so the only way to get around that issue is to make a new background image.

My top tips for backgrounds that work with the new Twitter design:

• Type your most important message vertically, within a 48 x 500 pixel space (measuring from the top left). Almost everyone will be able to see this. Your brand name, logo or URL should go here if you want the maximum number of people to be able to see it.
• Use the space up to 120 x 700 pixels to place secondary messages such as email address, blog address, cross promotions or anything else you want to convey.
• Make use of Twitter’s new translucent sidebar area on the right: remember that whatever is in the background will show through this transparent area (on non-IE browsers). This is a great place for large, impactful simple shapes such as emblems or logos. Don’t put text or anything small or fiddly on the right because it will look cluttered.
• Remember your high-res users by making a really wide image. You don’t need to put anything aside from simple colours on the far right, but make sure it ends gracefully (with a fade out or something). Also remember that high-res users will also see a lot more of the page vertically, too – ensure your coloured background stretches far enough vertically and doesn’t just end abruptly. NOTE: At present, it seems Twitter doesn’t like images larger that 2600 pixels wide, so it’s scaling things down when they are larger than that.
• Don’t put anything important in the far right or far bottom, but you can use this space for a bit of fun to give your high-res viewers a treat. If your monitor is set to a high resolution, have a look at my Twitter page to see what I mean.

With thanks to Stephen Fry and Pete Cashmore / Mashable… hope you don’t mind me using you as examples

*Monitor resolution statistics from W3Counter.

Updated 28 September following Hugh’s comment: removed scrolling background mention.

Last week I popped along to see a screening of Ivo Gormley’s documentary Us Now, presented by my old colleagues at NESTA. Not only was I curious to see the film, but I was also curious to see what was happening in the whole ‘social networking’ strand of NESTA’s Connect programme, as some potentially cool stuff seemed to be brewing just as I was leaving my job there.

Although I didn’t get much of an insight into the programme’s projects and output, I did enjoy Rohan Gunatillake‘s intro into the film, especially the tag clouds he had made based on the first names and employers of who had registered for tickets (no surprise that ‘Miko’ was a tiny speck in the cloud, dwarfed by ‘Paul’ and ‘Sarah’!). Rohan is the new member of NESTA Connect who is looking after the Web Connect side of things. I look forward to finding out more about what Rohan has in mind for NESTA.

The film itself was an hour-long series of interviews and case studies on various social media projects, based mainly in the UK. The intention of the film was to demonstrate how social media is not just a side activity people use to waste time and gab with their mates, but that the very nature of exposing connections and allowing for easier connection and collaboration between individuals could have a profound impact on society as a whole. Ivo Gormley introduced the film by stating:

more people can say more things to more people than ever before

- and there’s no way something as big as that can’t have an impact. I agree – there’s no denying this has had huge impact on the way business, governments and individuals now communicate. Transparency is now more critical than being ‘on message’; timeliness is now more important than dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. This was touched on in the film, but the core messages of the film were about connectivity, participation and trust.

I was glad to see some case studies I hadn’t already heard of, and I particularly liked the inclusion of an offline case study: that of Morecambe Council, who decided to let the town citizens choose how to spend £20,000 of taxpayer money on a project of their choosing. The projects ranged from improving playground facilities, to cleaning up the churchyard, to building new track for the model railway. Each project had a live 5-minute pitch, and the audience (town citizens) could vote on who got the money – a real return to town hall meetings of not-so-long ago.

It would be interesting to see if Gormley would have made a different film today, knowing what we now know about the Obama campaign and his commitment to returning power to the people. I think an interesting parallel could be drawn between the Morecambe case study and Obama’s decision to empower his constituency to canvas for votes using their own language in their own time. I think examples such as these set a precedent in which people expect to be involved, and once that’s set, it’s hard to go back to the old top-down ways. It’s this increasing expectation of participation that will create lasting, real change. The more we can collaborate, edit, re-write, comment on, vote, rate, review, participate, upload, remix, mash-up, link up and create content online, the more we will come to expect it as a baseline part of the deal, whether online or off.

It’s hard to convey the sense of hope and positivity the film embued, so I suggest you check it out for yourself. There’s loads of clips and info over here on the Us Now site if you can’t make it to a screening. And if you fancy seeing what impact the film had on the audience, Rohan has put together a Slideshare deck made up of people’s written response to the film on the night. Warm feelings just in time for Christmas!

I’m looking forward to tonight’s inaugural NetSquared London Meetup: a head-to-head ‘battle’ between the major blog platforms: MovableType, WordPress, Blogger and TypePad. Having evaluated all of these platforms before settling on the final winner for our needs at NESTA (TypePad), and as an avid user and ‘pusher’ of WordPress myself, I am looking forward to hearing what the passionate defenders of each platform have to say. I’m also looking forward to meeting up with people in person, having followed or met various people through Chinwag lists or elsewhere in the virtual world.