Existing Corporate Social Media Usage Guidelines and Policies
Last Thursday at our first Swiss Corporate Social Media Meet I was quite impressed about the amount of questions that were being asked from the audience. Having over 100 corporate stakeholders attending this three hour meetup about social media for business usage was – I think – a big breakthrough in Switzerland. The great majority of the crowd were decision makers from large companies in or around Zurich. We received questions from „can we ban social media in our bank?“, to „what is social media?“, which the four speakers tried to give a first insight to.
Also, a senior marketeer from a leading multinational on healthy food products asked me during networking time: “are there any existing policies out there that would provide a credible starting point for both employees and managers to start engaging more with their end-users through existing social media tools”? Below are a few examples of companies that are using some kind of social media policy or set of guidelines:
Government: U.K. Government (Template Twitter strategy), Education: Harvard University, Technology solutions companies: IBM, SAP , Automotive: Daimler, General Motors.
Personally I like the very short policy that GM uses (adapted from Charlene Li – source below).
I could not yet trace any existing social media policies in banks or other financial services firms. I do think that we can expect them soon if I can take the audience of our last week’s Meetup as sample measurement: at least 40% of them were representatives from the Finance and Banking industries! In particular we have received positive feedback from the presentation of Matthias Kröner, who – as the first one in Europe – received a banking license for a community in June 2009 (press release here). Highly shocking for bankers (as we saw from Matthias at the SOMESSO Zurich conference at Swiss Re last year), but overall accepted as Matthias was CEO of a bank for over 9 years. Moreover, I did find some thoughts from a banker explaining how banks could make the jump into social media.
Loads has been written about social media policies and guidelines. Here are some links for further reading to sources we acknowledge:
Charlene Li (post from when she was still at Forrester research)
Comprehensive list of 120+ (mostly American) companies’ social media guidelines and policies