There are a lot of reasons why people hate policies. Sometimes people hate policies because they are difficult to understand. Other times people hate policies because they seem redundant or impractical to follow. Other times, people hate policies because they don't understand why they are important. Well, one of the best ways to make sure people understand why your company's social media policy is important is to let them know up front why it matters. Before you dive into a lot of bullet points and do's and dont's, let them know why you have a policy in the first place. Give the policy some context.

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Once you have established the broad strategic goals of setting the tone for your policy, setting the proper expectations, and setting the ground rules, you are ready to assemble your social media policy team.

Your team will serve two main functions: first, your team will generate and develop the ideas that form the basis for your policy; and second, your team will be work to anticipate any potential problems with the implementation of your policy. Keeping these two functions in mind is important to creating the highest-quality policy that will also be most likely to be accepted by your company's executives.

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It's a fact of life in the social era. Your customers, employees, vendors, and shareholders are using social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a million others to talk about the things that are important to them. They are talking about their vacation plans, what they had for dinner, and—in all likelihood—how they feel about shopping at, working for, selling to, or owning a piece of your business.

These conversations can help your organization develop great relationships with key stakeholders that can result in new, innovative ideas for your business; they can also sometimes share a negative message about your organization. A well-planned and well-written social media policy can help your employees understand their role in the social media community of your company, and can help increase the likelihood that the conversations that happen online will have a positive impact on your business.

As a leader in an organization, one of your most important jobs is providing guidance for the kinds of behavior that is expected of your employees. Your company probably already has policies that discuss topics like discrimination, sexual harassment, and computer security. It is also important for your company to have a standard set of guidelines for the behavior you expect of them when they participate in social media. I will be dedicating the next few posts on Internal Social to discussing some of the building blocks for an effective, purposeful social media policy.

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If you want information about how to convince your CEO that your company should use social media, there are plenty of resources out there for you. There are lists of tips that seem they should to be able to convince even the most skeptical CEO that a social strategy is a good choice for their organization. Unfortunately, even the best efforts sometimes fall on deaf ears. Just as not everyone was ready to adopt a web strategy in the 1990s, not every company has the organizational will to engage on the social media playing field today.

So, you've laid out a brilliant strategy for social media, you've found the budget to support it, and you have a team of people on board, but you still hear a resounding "No" from the board room. Now what happens? I think you just might experience the five stages of grief that we probably all remember from Psychology 101 in college. Sure, losing the ability to tweet about coupons or corporate events may not be quite as traumatic as losing a loved one, but the grief and recovery process is similar. Here are the Five Stages of Social Media Grief, as I see them.

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Talk about a paradox. OpenDNS, a well-known network and security company, just released its 2010 Report On Web Trends that listed Facebook as the #1 most likely site to be blocked by companies that use blacklisting to keep their employees off of certain "undesirable" websites, but also found that the site is the #2 most frequently allowed by companies that use a whitelist to guarantee access to specific sites inside of their firewall.

What does that mean? Well, it means that Corporate America has a love-hate relationship with Facebook. In many organizations, Facebook is crucial to accessing customer information, researching competitive data, sharing news and company events, and connecting with other professionals for advice and problem-solving. These companies treat access to a Facebook as a business necessity and configure their network to make sure their employees can get on to the site quickly and easily. On the other hand, some organizations treat Facebook as a worthless time-suck and do everything they can to make sure their employees aren't "wasting" time talking to friends or family when they are expected to be (apparently) buried face-first in the computer monitor examining spreadsheets like they are working in the digital version of a Dickensian workhouse.

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According to a recent McKinsey report, networked enterprises are outperforming their competitors. The researchers have found a strong correlation between companies' internal and external use of tools like social networking and blogs and measurable business benefits, such as easier access to knowledge and greater marketing awareness. These benefits were especially clear in organizations who used social tools both to build relationships with external customers and to foster community inside the organization. In spite of this exciting finding, though, the research begs the question: Are these companies' improved results because of the social tools themselves, or are they performing well because they are simply more open organizations in general, and their use of social tools is just one example of their openness.

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I have been working on creating a set of social media guidelines for a corporation, and as a result, I am examining social media policies across the business spectrum. They range widely in quality, from the relatively liberal policy at Intel to the draconian Associated Press policy that not only demands that you watch what you say on social media, but asks that you also delete any postings by friends that may violate the policy. As a general rule, I have found that the existing social media policies address two areas: First, guidelines for what to do when you are representing the company in an official capacity, such as blogging on a corporate website, and second, guidelines for personal social media activities such as facebook, blogging, etc.

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The conventional wisdom about Twitter seems to be that it is great for posting a random thought about the news or getting some friends together for beer, but it can't be used for anything that serious. I disagree. Microblogging can be a powerful communication tool in an organization.

Tweeting Tech Support

Chris Arkenberg wrote about a recent incident in which he called up AT&T/iPhone support with a question about whether iPhone Twitter apps use SMS to transmit data. He eventually got a hedged non-answer after 15 minutes of waiting, but it got him thinking about how people find answers to questions in business situations.

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I frequently read Janet Clarey's blog and was interested in what she had to say in her recent post about social learning in small and medium businesses. I was particularly struck by her conclusion:

“If you don’t have a supportive culture of openness and sharing you are screwed. Need to do the work there first.”

This reminded me of a recent conversation I had with a Vice President at a medium-sized retail company. The topic of Twitter came up, and he had an opinion that is typical for those who are skeptical of social media. He asked, point blank, "what good would it possibly do for [CEO Name] to be on Twitter?"

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Note: This is a reprint of an article I wrote for Just Creative Design. Although it isn't directly linked to social organizations, I thought the content might be helpful to some of you.

One of the biggest mistakes I see from web designers is making accessibility more complicated than it should be. When most designers think of creating accessible content, they imagine hours of exaggerated tagging, designing tab-browsing and hot keys for every minute function of a site, and writing over-descriptive metadata. Most people just give up and don’t even bother. However, by using some simple techniques and following  basic guidelines, you can make your website accessible to a wide audience of users without spending too much time and energy.

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