Spotter’s Blog 
Richard Weetman,
Director of Clients relations,
Spotter,
Social media policies – useful tools but legal uncertainty
Just do it?… About the use of social media in a professional environment.
Richard Weetman is British and has been working for Spotter more than 8 years. With a strong experience in the launch and management of monitoring and analysis project, in a wide range of sectors, he is the head of the Client Support department, making sure our clients benefit from the support of their dedicated contact.
www.spotter.com
You can also find this post on : themarketinglounge
Following a recent discussion with Celina Molina, one of my colleagues, about the use of Social Media at work (which led to an interesting blog post
I decided to look a bit more into the different types of social media policies that exist.
I suggested in our conversation that any attempt to prevent an employee from speaking his mind, be it online or not, would at least in my opinion be in contradiction with our fundamental right to free speech. Obviously the same rules should apply online as in normal everyday life, so slander, racism, sexual harassment and so on are not acceptable, and saying something that unfoundedly causes harm to your company would inevitably end with disciplinary action being taken, but is there a need to have a specific policy for social media?
I decided to do a bit of research to see what some major companies include in their policies (for information, this website was very useful ; there are 168 different policies available for consultation: – and no, I didn’t read all 168!). To be honest, I expected to find far more restrictive policies than I did, which is reassuring to a certain extent as it would tend to show that employers that have introduced policies understand that it is more important to provide guidelines for employees, making them feel “part of the game”, rather than just banning them from using social media completely. Of course there are some very strict examples to be found, and in some cases the policies backfire and lead to a lot of negative stuff being published (e.g. the Commonwealth Bank), but most of the policies I read seem pretty well thought out, from a layman’s point of view, offering fairly commonsense rules as to the type of things that employees can or can’t say. It became clear that introducing a social media policy is in fact a very important step, not only to protect the company but also to help employees use them more effectively.
One of the things that I noted over the past few days is that this topic is clearly a live one. A simple Twitter search with “social media policy” brings up numerous tweets and blog posts being published pretty much all of the time, so anyone who is looking into setting up a social media policy has loads of information to help them do so (for example, here is a good blog post that was tweeted a lot recently: 10 Considerations When Creating a Social Media Policy).
Coming back to my initial question about our right to free speech, I noticed that in the US a lot of tweets were asking the question “Does Your Social Media Policy Violate the Law?”, referring to a recent report in the New York Times that the NRLB (National Labor Relations Board) intends to file a complaint against Thomson Reuters, accusing the company of illegally reprimanding a reporter over a public Twitter posting she had sent criticizing management. Without going into the details of the case (which can be found here) , it is interesting that this decision inevitably leads to the question mentioned above, with many firms probably needing to change their policies to avoid similar action. I’m no legal expert, but I expect that over the coming months there will be further similar cases and that the question of the legality of social media policies will stick around for some time to come, forcing HR or legal departments to stay on the tips of their toes!
One thing is certain though, whilst the hot discussion about these policies shows that a company’s reputation is extremely fragile on social media and that the introduction of guidance/rules for employees can be beneficial, it also has implications in terms of media monitoring. It is clear that an effective monitoring system, as well as being essential for gaining insight into your industry, the trends in your sector, or keeping in touch with potential clients and partners, is also essential to be able to limit reputational risks and counter any negative issues that may arise.