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.

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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.

Well someone did:

This is my personal favourite intranet secret. You see, those lovely peeps at ThoughtFarmer have created a new blog called Intranet Secrets, where you can anonymously post your deepest, darkest secrets about your company’s intranet. I have posted one of my own… but I’m not telling you which one is mine! If your company has done something silly, useless or downright stupid with your intranet, why not get it off your chest. You will feel better knowing others can finally point and laugh along with you.

Random Disclaimer: I’m not paid by or associated with ThoughtFarmer, but I sure do recommend their product, having used it myself twice, both as a client and as a consultant. It’s pretty freaking awesome, if I do say so myself.

I’ve been meaning to write this post since Gordon Rae tipped me off to this article, as I’m not 100% convinced that large enterprises make “superb test beds for social software”. Sure, there are many characteristics of large enterprises which make this true: high volume of users, geographic distances that make other means of communication pale in comparison, likelihood of cross-team projects that require collaboration, and common interests/areas of focus between people in similar roles in different parts of the business – not to mention the fact that it’s a closed system (environment). But there are also a few factors that make the opposite true.

Large enterprises are slow-moving beasts, and they usually have existing systems that they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of pounds building, configuring and implementing. Any new software project will usually need to integrate or otherwise link up with these legacy systems, and that’s something that not many social tools on the market today can do easily. Furthermore, the business will have spent a lot of time developing relationships with the suppliers of these legacy systems, and it can often be easier (or seemingly more cost-effective) to go back to an existing supplier when faced with a need for new functionality. In many cases, businesses will take whatever’s presented to them by these trusted suppliers rather than waste time exploring whether or not the offered solution is the best tool for the users.

Even more challenging is the circumstance when social software is supposed to replace existing system(s). The business has invested so much in these systems, that it can be very tricky to disentangle the legacy tool, and incredibly complex to figure out how exactly to migrate across to the new one. Plus there’s the burden of training & support. And funnily enough, there’s also the cost factor. Ironically, most social software costs a fraction of what large enterprises pay for enterprise tools, and it’s exactly this that is so off-putting to budget-holders. Most of them have been spending 6 figures on things for so long that they think anything with such a low price tag must be gimmicky, dubious or unfit for purpose.

In a large enterprise, it’s the IT Manager/Director’s job to support the infrastructure, keep the data safe, and ensure technology in the business is robust and reliable. These guys aren’t supposed to take big risks, and that’s just what many of them see when presented with most social web tools. It’s much safer for them to stick with the Microsofts of the world than to embrace some new kid on the block whose reputation is only a few years old at best. The world of “permanent beta” just doesn’t fly when it comes to large corporates; these guys need solid, tested, guaranteed secure, guaranteed working tools. Because if it all goes wrong, it’s their ass on the line.

The formal style of management is also a factor in large enterprises. There tend to be several layers of management in these organisations,  and each of these will have their own KPIs and goals. It can be hard to sell in the value of seemingly “fluffy” benefits like having a more connected workplace or better collaboration and knowledge-sharing. Unless it’s something that can be easily measured with cold hard facts or slots nicely into the SMART system of performance management, it’s difficult to get buy in from all the necessary stakeholders. And without their support, you can rarely introduce new tools into the environment – or see them succeed if you do manage to get in there. When a worker’s manager thinks “all this social web stuff is a waste of time”, she’s much less likely to spend time filling out her profile page, commenting on internal blogs or tagging documents.

I’m not saying that social software doesn’t belong in large enterprise; in fact I strongly believe the opposite. But all of the above means that social software rarely stands a chance of getting through the door in the first place. And getting through the door is just one hurdle: the biggest one is often the corporate culture itself. Social software has the potential to be revolutionary, and can change the very fabric of the underlying corporate culture, moving some businesses from a ‘silo-ed’, one-way, up-the-chain communication style, to an open, networked, free-flowing one. This cannot happen overnight, and it cannot happen without active engagement from people up and down the chain. And it’s the scale that’s problematic: it’s a lot harder to turn an aircraft carrier than it is to turn a rowboat, especially when you’re dealing with an intangible thing like attitudes and internal culture.

I’m optimistic that we are at the start of a sea-change in large enterprise, as the Baseline article indicates – but it’s going to take a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get us there.

Off the back of my recent invitation to speak on a panel at the Office 2.0 conference, I decided it was about time I went public about all the online tools that I & my team have introduced to NESTA. Here’s a quick runthrough:

Our Intranet is a structured (hybrid) wiki powered by ThoughtFarmer… We’ve also been using CommunityServer to drive our internal blogs & discussion boards… We use Central Desktop for a number of things: my own team uses it as a collaborative workspace for all work, from steady-state ‘rolling’ work, to discrete projects… We’re using del.icio.us to do some pretty cool things aside from the usual social bookmarking. For example, our Innovation Digest email newsletter is created from a del.icio.us feed, as is the online version… we’re using Yahoo Pipes to meld 2 feeds from our Typepad blogs to fill the ‘blogs’ slot on our website homepage… We’ve introduced Netvibes to various staff members… We’ve used WebEx to enable our UK Partnerships team to collaborate across distances, often as an alternative to flying…

More info can be found in the full post on the NESTA blog >>

We just launched our new structured wiki Intranet at NESTA, and I can’t wait to see how this new approach works for the staff in a small/med public sector organisation such as ours. Here’s a post I wrote on the NESTA blogs about it:

I think the structured wiki approach is a great way of introducing organisations to the concepts of the social web – in theory, providing the best of both worlds: the empowerment and collaborative elements of wikis, with the order and familiarity of traditional content-managed systems. In my mind, this caters for both types of users: the freeform searchers & the more traditional navigators. It reduces the fear of chaos, while still providing a great deal of the flexibility and tools common in other ‘social web’ environments…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>