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It’s always quite a pity to see companies and organizations that overreact to the occasional social media gaffe and impose overly strict guidelines on employees concerning their use of personal networks. If anything, such restrictions create incentives for employees to “leak” their complaints, while the overall integrity of the company’s reputation is no less secure.
Take the New York Times, for example. Not too long ago, a managing editor was interviewed on Poynter who expressed his surprise over all the questions over the newspaper’s social media policy, as they had never really had any problem with the “common sense” approach.
Phil Corbett writes:
We have not done a very formal, detailed written policy. We’ve talked about it, but up until now we’ve made a conscious decision not to do that. Partly because we’ve really been encouraging our journalists over the past couple of years to embrace social media, to use it as a tool, to get comfortable with it. (…)
But in general our message is that people should be thoughtful. They need to realize that social media is basically a public activity, it’s not a private activity, and that people will know that they work for the Times, that they are Times journalists, and will identify them with the Times. And so they should just keep that in mind and be careful not to do anything on social media that would undercut their credibility. …
So far this approach seems to be working for us. People have been smart about it, and thoughtful.
You’ve got to appreciate the Times approach – they place their trust in their employees to go out there on social media and be themselves. Now of course things might be different at a defense contractor, oil company, or a mining operator with a track record of accidents, but in general, an overly restrictive social media policy can often backfire.
Just take a look at the International Olympic Commission (IOC), whose tight social media policy is prompting resistance among athletes competing in the games, who rely on social media to connect with fans, supporters, and sponsors. From the Times of India:
The strict rules over the use of social media by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) during the London 2012 Olympics has been slammed by participants, for being ‘stifling and overbearing’.
According to the IOC’s official guidelines, it generally encourages social media use by participants and fans, yet only allows tweets, blogs and posts to other social networks in “a first-person, diary-type format.”
It also restricts sharing video from the Olympic Village, while athletes are required to obtain permission from their peers before posting photos they snap of other athletes.
American sprinter Nick Symmonds claimed the rules are “ludicrous” and go too far.
“Why would you want to handicap a form of media that only increases exposure for your event? If you’re trying to make these the most watched Games in the history of the world, why would you take the people responsible for that history and say, ‘Hey, you can’t do that, you can’t share?’ Limiting it seems so stupid,” Mashable quoted Symmonds, as saying.
