Social media policies: just the tip of the iceberg?

Snuffling around the Internet last week, doing some reading on social media trends, I was reminded of a great post by Arthur Goldstuck on corporate blogging.

The post is from late 2007, when Nationwide Airlines still existed but was suffering from wings spontaneously popping off the side of planes. Idols was coming to an end and Goldstuck found himself on a Kulula flight with the five finalists. (They should have been flying Nationwide, the official sponsor, but the planes were grounded).

At the end of the flight, the Kulula pilot quips:
“On behalf of Nationwide airlines, sponsors of Idols, we would like to thank you all for flying kulula.com.”

Goldstuck writes: “[T]he captain’s comment couldn’t possibly have been scripted. It is unlikely that the marketing department was on standby with a scriptwriter in the eventuality of the pilot needing a quick actuality joke. Rather, the punch line to the flight seemed to flow naturally from the attitude of the crew, the culture of the airline and an adventurous approach to communicating with customers.”

In this case, Goldstuck goes on to talk about corporate blogging, and how Kulula was perfectly placed to maximise a corporate blog, written by its staff.

Of course nowadays things have got a bit more complicated than simply blogging (although I remember from my corporate days that setting up a company blog was not an uncomplicated thing either). Companies can, and are being encouraged to, engage with the world using a host of social media channels, including Twitter, Zoopy, Blueworld, MXit and the like.

So this raises the question: How does a business engage with the world using social media in a successful, engaging and authentic way, while still ensuring the content is on message?

And more seriously, is the inability to get this right a big, red warning sign that something more fundamental might have gone awry? Could the fact that you can’t easily enable your staff to engage in social media be the canary in the coal mine pointing to an alarming corporate culture that can’t and doesn’t enable its staff? A corporate culture that, in my mind anyway, is ultimately unsustainable. A bit like the Soviet Union once Levi’s Jeans and rock music arrived.

Companies like Kulula are unfortunately few and far between. And, to be fair, many companies admirably strive for this type of culture (hopefully from the grass roots up as opposed to via a three-month company culture and value exercise run by external consultants). The reality however is that many companies wanting to engage using social media channels will need to put some guidelines in place.

The challenge is to get the balance right. Not stifling spontaneity and individual expression, while still achieving company goals – let’s not fool ourselves here, there is a commercial impetus for this activity.

Back to my Internet snuffling. I came across this useful-looking resource: The Altimeter Wiki. It lists a bunch of social media consultants and agencies (mostly US based, maybe we should get some South African names up there?) and also points to a range of social media policies including those of the BBC, Harvard Law School, Cisco and Robert Scoble.

The BBC’s policy doc takes the issue a bit further. Entitled “BBC Guidance on Personal use of Social Networking”, it highlights the impact that private blogging can have on a corporate reputation. As most of us know, with the Internet you have very few secrets, so it’s often pretty easy to link an individual with their employer.

The problem is, this raises the sort of conundrum that my high school headmaster seemed to spend his time grappling with. I distinctly remember being told that even if you weren’t in uniform, people could reasonably identify you as a pupil of a certain school, so you better behave accordingly. So far so good, if somewhat draconian, but I do remember wracking my teenage brain to work out what this meant for someone who didn’t go to my school but had strayed across suburb lines and hence could be mistaken for a pupil at my school. Would they too be subject to my school rules? How would they know what they are? What happens if my school rules conflicted with their school rules?

Back to social media policies, personally I am a fan of common sense prevailing and keeping it simple when it comes to these sort of  guidelines. It’s an idea to involve your staff in setting them up.

This social media thing won’t go away, and will definitely get sucked into the mainstream. No amount of band-aiding will help though, if underneath it all your corporate culture needs a bit of CPR.