Setting Up Family Social Media Policy Rules

Creating a Family Social Media Policy: part 3

So, you believe now that you NEED to have a Family Social Media Policy and you have finished the Steps to ensure that your Family Social Media Policy is a success, now it’s time to actually making the Social Media Policy for your family! 

Again, how you go about doing this should work for your own family dynamic.  Maybe you and your spouse hammer it out and announced the new regime or maybe a family meeting works best in your home. In any case there are quite a few things to think about:

What Defines Social Media to Your Family?  

While the industry professionals might debate over what exactly defines social media, for your family’s purposes it’s pretty safe to just say “anything you do online” whether it be Facebook, or MySpace, or YouTube, or Blogs, or Forums, or commenting, or posting pictures, or liking or digging or.. you get it? Even if a place is not “social” today, chances are that they are debating right now on whether they should install Facebook connect or whether social sharing buttons are good enough.  If it’s not “social” now, it very well could be next month. It might be wise to include mobile devices as well in this broad description since most phone applications are developed to hook into some social network. Cover your bases and declare all things online as being suspect.

What Is and Is Not Allowed Online?

After it is clear what means of communication the rules will apply to, then it’s a good time to break out the basics.  What is most important to you as a family might differ and your own rules of social media might be altered to fit your needs. There are basic web standards that should be explained, the webiquette, if you will.  Of course, that would imply that you have a decent understanding of what your kids are doing and how it all works. If you have yet to ever meander over to Facebook and still confuse YouTube with MTV, then you should get your feet wet before you tackle this or your kids are going to snow you.

Assuming that you also live online, it might could be easier to take a look at your own online activity and examine your own personal social media policy. Then you have already identified what is important to you and your own personal ethics. It’s much easier to teach something if you understand it yourself! Look online for ideas and articles and blog posts on web ethics and find your fit if needed. Once you have a clear understanding of how you want your kids to act online, then set to writing it down.  It often good to follow some tried and true golden standards so, here is where you really can wear your parent hat.

 Break out the Ten Commandments of Social Media Parenting

“And the parents spoke all these words, saying: ‘I am the payer of the household wireless and cell phones and I will take it away…

ONE: ‘You shall have no other accounts on any one network beside the one account created with.‘

TWO: ‘You shall not make for yourself a “fake” identity –any pretended likeness of anything that is in a variation of yourself for the purpose to hide or trick others.

THREE: ‘You shall not curse or be profane when typing nor texting .‘

FOUR: ‘Remember the clothing and never post nor look at anything of anyone lacking clothes..‘

FIVE: ‘Honor your father and your mother and your teachers and your friends and your neighbors and your boss and your coworkers and don’t talk trash online .‘

SIX: ‘You shall not post murderous threats, nor bully, nor act in a disturbing fashion.‘

SEVEN: ‘You shall not enter unto any site that is pornographic in nature, nor is scandalous and without your parents express permission. .‘

EIGHT: ‘You shall not steal and join anything or buy anything online using any of our plastic or accounts.‘

NINE: ‘You shall not bear post insults nor spam nor be mean to fellow user profiles‘

TEN: ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s code; you shall not covet your neighbor’s images, nor his website copy, nor his blog post, nor anything that is your neighbor’s least you invoke the copyright god’s wrath.‘

It would be wise for all, assuming you didn’t go for stone tablets, to print out the basic rules and post them by the computers in your household.  This probably should be the big ticket items that cannot be excused or ignored for any reasoning without the express permission of said parents.  Again, depending on your family, it’s always good to make it very clear at this point what consequence are in store for anyone tempted to break the Ten Commandments of your Family Social Media Policy. One must follow one of the Parenting Big Ten and follow through with ramifications due to bad choices on behalf of said children.

Now the internet is growing and changing all the time, so chances area that you will have to re-examine many of the issues  as time goes by. There is also a lot of gray areas online and sometimes behavior can be a matter of perspective. After you get past the basics, then it’s good to discuss and divine some of the deeper issues of social interactions online.

Some questions about social media interactions to discuss with your family:

• What do individuals have the right to post about and what crosses the line?
• Is it Ok for your son to post embarrassing pictures of his sister?
• Or can he only post embarrassing pictures of himself?
• Can people only tag themselves? 
• Can your sister tag pictures of your kids with their full names?
• What about your neighbor?
• What happens when you disagree online?
• How should one handle a fight between friends on the wall?
• Are we responsible for what other people post on our profiles?
• Where is the line of privacy?
• Is it ok to read another person’s emails?
• What should one do if they do see someone “online” who they think needs help?
• What does cyber bulling look like?

In almost all ways what happens online mimics the issues and concerns in real life. In truth, these conversations should be happening with our kids anyway and we need to make sure they are prepared for life online and off. 

Take the opportunity of creating a social media policy to define how your family is represented online and you might be amazed at how our computers and the internet have the ability to bring people together, even if they live in the  same house.

Creating a Family Social Media Policy: part 2

Now that I have convinced you that you are a bad parent and the lives of your loved ones will be ruined in Creating a  Family Social Media Policy: part 1, we shall look at the beginning steps.  As with all things parenting related, creating a family social media policy will involved education, monitoring and rules.

One of the first hurdles to get over is convincing your children of WHY a Family social media policy is important. Granted, you might not parent by democracy, but  by educating your kids (and other family members if necessary) why it is important, there is a better chance of compliance through that understanding so let’s discuss first some reasons to avoid internet blunders.

The Importance of An Online Reputation

While it can seem like out of site equals out of mind, once you hit send it’s not really gone!

Google, God off all things on the internet still, indexes and files things away. Even pages on URL altered and taken down can be cached, meaning Google has a copy of it and will show that URL  in search results often for months after the page itself is long gone.

Plus, there is always the screen shot. Say you have a huge forum spat with some unknown poster on some message board and it gets nasty. Later on you have cooled down and repented, so you delete all your curses and wishes for a slow painful death.  Let’s pretend that you might even feel somewhat embarrassed by you lack of emotional control at the keyboard and apologize. That’s all well and good, but what if he subject of your wrath took a screen shot or anyone else who might have wandered by and found your exchange offensive.? Now proof of your outburst is forever under someone else’s control and they have the ability to post the conversation someplace for all to say and ruin your good name.

Even if we look at something in “real time”, not a permanent installation online like a webpage, but a tweet has a very very long shelf life.. forever! It was announced this spring that  every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. All your 140 character thoughts are preserved for all mankind.

Protecting Your Kids from Themselves and Online Threats

Let’s get back to the idea of an online resume.

I recently spoke to a group of College kids about social media and the one thing I ordered them to do immediately was to go home and clean up their Facebook profiles. Why?  Because of the real permanence of our online selves exists long after we might grow up and mature. What one puts online does represent us, so kids need to start projecting what they want to be as who they are now! Want to be a writer? Start writing! As I explained to them, don’t have pictures of you looking all wasted surrounded by empty beer cans unless you WANT to be known as that party guy.  Which in some case, like the lifelong dream to be the next Def Leopard drummer or Bam Margera’s new best friend, the crazy pictures would be a good thing, alas a school counselor, not so much!

The future employers of your children WILL Google them as many places do this already. The college admissions advisors WILL Googled them too.  They CAN lose out of chances and opportunities in life based on a nasty Tweet or a very questionable image.  This is the world that our kids are growing up in and then need to know how to be prepared for it.

Part of the educational aspect of watching what we do online also means that we are wary of sites that can hurt not only us, but our computers. Kids should be taught to beware of spyware and virus and what to do if something suspicious pops up.  There are a bunch of really clever viruses that are cloaked to look like an antivirus and are very convincing in order to get one to make that initial click. With some of them, all your kids has to do is one simple click and you will spend hundreds of dollars with the Geek Squad  hoping that you don’t have to upgrade your laptop right now.

Cheesy Nigerian lotteries, long lost relatives, phishing scams, Facebook friends trapped in London and needing money, Fake PayPal emails looking for account numbers, cyber bulling AND pornography… yeah, you should talk to your kids about what to do in these situations. There really is an Internet Boogie Man and he is not just under the bed! Think of it like a fire drill. Discuss, prepare and practice the safe procedures for if and when these threats strike.

Monitoring: Setting Up Google Alerts for your Family

It’s really easy to monitor what goes online about your family with Google Alerts.

Google Alerts  allows you to not only see what Google is indexing or  categorizing based on your family names so that it shows up in searches, that immediate family members put up under your names, but also allows you to keep track of what other people are putting online about you are you kids!  That’s means if a friend puts up a picture on Flickr with your child’s full name, you will see it. Or if you get a mention in a local newspaper, you will see it. Or if a co-worker is venting about your husband on Twitter, you will see it.

To set up Google Alerts, all you have to have is an email address and go to Google Alerts. Put in your  search terms, in this case the names of your family members and tell Google which email address you would like the alerts sent to. So you do not get inundated with tons of emails about every other kids online name Brittney, use quotes. For Example: “Brittney MacDougal”. This tells Google that you are only interested in these two terms together. Granted you will get notified about any other Brittney MacDougal that might have something online, but it’s a heck of a lot better than getting every celebrity news about Brittney Spears. If your last name is very common, then you are probably going to get very good at skimming through alerts quickly.

Once the alerts are set up, then all you have to do is wait for them to get delivered to your email box. In addition to Google alerts, if your kids are particularly social,  you can run their names or their email address through Social Mention and set up alerts for names as well. Then check out the link and see who is saying what and where!

Granted, depending on your kids ages, you should know what they are doing online and where they are going.  Again, depending, it’s not a bad idea for parents to know the log ins to their children’s online profiles and check up on them periodically.  I know I had to have a few conversations with my young teenage son about things that girls put on his “comment” box that really, were way out of line and crazy overtly sexual.  Maybe these were not the easiest conversations to have, but he needed to know that I was aware and I was reassured to hear that he thought these young ladies were half out of their gourds as well. Just as kids need supervision at home and get in the most trouble between the times of 3 and 5 when parents are still at work, kids need supervision online too and do better if they know that mom or dad might be checking their walls when they least expect it.

The fact is, if you are prepared to have rules for your family to follow regarding social media, then you better have the means to know if they are adhering or breaking the rules otherwise, you are just wasting time and proving that your family and walk all over you! So yes creating a family social media policy does mean that you, as a parent, have more work to do!

Setting Up Family Social Media Policy Rules

Creating a Family Social Media Policy: part 3

Creating a Family Social Media Policy: part 1

A Facebook comment  on my post  about needing a Personal Social Media Policy inspire me to think about the need for a Family Social Media Policy. Social Media Policies are not just good for businesses, not just good for people, they are good and necessary for any organization and that includes a family!

Why Develop a Social Media Policy for Your Family?

Let’s think about it for a second.  The internet use to be fairly simple. We all had weird screen names that included many odd numbers since the whole world was on AOL and there could only be so many johnnycakes 3000. No one was who they really were in real life and the rules were simple: hide  everything!

• Don’t post a real picture of yourself.
• Don’t name your kids names.
• Never let it out where you work or even what you do because “they” might be able to figure out that SuzieQ239 who works at Macys really is Susanna Metcalf from ladies intimates.

It’s gotten much more complicated now.

For one, the mysterious “they” are really your friends, family, co-workers and neighbors. Instead of hiding everything, it feels much less scary to let your cousin see the picture of your kids in their undies on Christmas morning. Of course, now that undies picture IS attached to your name and your cousin has very similar pictures of YOU at that age.. also in your underwear.  What happens if he posts them, or a future boss looks you up on line and thinks he sees child pornography? Plus no matter how much you love the old school Metallic video links that he shares on Facebook, do you really want Stan from the accounting to see wearing Wonder Woman Under-roos?

One of the major concerns about social media right now is Facebook and the privacy issues. On top of that Facebook post are now being indexed by both BING and OneRiot.  That means if that very same cousin tags the picture of you in your Wonder Woman Under-roos, you better hope you have your privacy setting set up right.  So it IS because you don’t want your Underoo modeling to be plastered all over the internet and to show up when your next employer Googles your name. That is a real thing to be concerned about.

The problem is it’s hard to get a grasp on social media ourselves meanwhile our kids are off doing their own thing online! Something silly and insignificant now can cause real damage later on. I bet, as a concerned parent, you don’t want the pictures of your child, passed out at a party  to be found by HIS future employee either, but that is the world we live in. That’s human nature. We based our decisions on what we know, what we see. Would you hire this kid?

Families Growing Up with Social Media

I think even we find it hard to remember when we lived without a cell phone. Our children take this new world of social media as part of life and don’t think much of it.  I know I have seen my own older sons, now almost 19 and 23, flit around online,  creating profiles and then abandoning them haphazardly never to recall their password again.  While many parents are concerned and teach their kids about online predators, we also need to teach and educated our children about  what they leave behind online. Maybe they don’t think ahead enough, like many adults as well, what happens to what they send off when they hit send and where their leavings might end up! 

As social media become more and more important, what they put online is part of their identity. It is increasingly attached to our real selves, is searchable and not too private and is part of our online reputation.  In fact, for professional posters who understand this, what is online becomes part of our professional resumes.  

At the #140 Character Twitter NY Conference 2010, there was a panel comprised of students just on the verge of finishing college and entering the professional world. Every single one of them had already aligned themselves with fantastic job opportunities and connections in their chosen industries. While they were very bright and ambitious individuals, they all credited social media as a key component to finding connections that became relationships that became offers.

The good news is that our children will grow up with this wonderful new medium that has the ability to connect people like never before and provide amazing opportunities for them. The bad news is that, as parents, we have the additional responsibility of teaching them to wield this power wisely.

Creating a Family Social Media Policy allows you to teach your child valuable life skills. You allow your child the ability to use the internet freely and feel secure that they understand privacy boundaries and online safety. As these times morph and change, adding a family social media policy to your parenting tool set is a realistic and proactive step to take to ensure your family’s continued success …..

…..because you don’t want them to be these kids someday.

Steps Towards Creating  a Family Social Media Policy

Creating a Family Social Media Policy: part 2

Protect Your Internet Reputation In One Easy, Magical Step

Scour the web for information on Internet reputation management. Go ahead…scour. I’ll wait.

Chances are, most of what you find is lessons, tips, tricks, methods, ways and schemes to keep your digital nose clean and protect your Internet reputation. It’s all wrong. Most of what you will find are a range of approaches akin to business crisis management tactics – address immediately, suppress immediately, drown the crisis with misdirection, mask it with spin. It’s all wrong because these are all things you do after your Internet reputation takes a hit.

The best reputation management happens waaaay before the first poor review or the first snarky hit you take on Facebook. In other words, the most effective Internet reputation management strategy you have is the one that gathers dust on the shelf.

The Real Secret To Protect Your Internet Reputation Is…

…Don’t give the masses a reason to go after your reputation online in the first place. It’s not rocket surgery. Just because it’s the Internet and people can anonymously trash you or your brand doesn’t mean the actual rules of commerce are inapplicable. If your company treats customers or clients (or even employees) like morons, your company deserves the crappiest of crappy reputations. If you get stung on someone’s blog because your customer service rep did actually hang up on them, you deserve it. If your company just laid off 50 people the week before Christmas, you can’t be surprised when some of them clear their throat online.

Treat others well and word-of-mouth will travel in your favor. Common human decency is not suspended on the Internet. Neither is the concept of Karma.

Differences Between Internet Reputation Management And “Brick-And-Mortar” Reputation Management

In reality, all businesses suffer at least a few bad reviews and knocks to their web reputation. And, as many as the parallels are between protecting your reputation management online and in real life, there are some major differences:

• The speed at which bad p.r. spreads around the web – When it comes to web reputation management, the Internet was definitely built for speed and not for comfort. As fast as someone can post a scathing review on a highly-trafficked website, it can be spread around the web in hours.
• The amount of time it can take to discover poor reviews (and deal with them) – Bad p.r. and reviews can start eating away at your internet reputation for months before you ever spot it. You can (and should) stay on top of your digital rep by monitoring your brand on social networks and paying close attention to search results for your keywords on a continuing basis. Yeah, I would recommend doing that. Otherwise, you’re gonna get rocked. And when you do spot one, it can take a lengthy effort to knock a high-ranking site down in the search engine results.
• The ways you can counter it – This is where the worlds of internet reputation management and real world business reputation strategy really separate. In terms of SEO reputation management, protecting your rep means beating back negative sites in the search engine results. Off-line reputation recovery efforts can be much more influenced by unknown quantities, like public-sentiment. In other words, SEO-based web reputation management works to influence search engines and off-line strategies work to influence people.

Good Internet Reputation Management – Avoid It In The First Place

Just because there are ways to stifle dissent and bad p.r. on the Internet doesn’t mean companies or brands should tread less cautiously. At the same time, if you have one or two negative sites that keep popping up in search results, it doesn’t make you a bad business.  The best way to protect your Internet reputation, though, is to prevent having to use it.

Check out our online reputation management services at DragonSearch for methods we use to protect your Internet reputation.

Every so often, I encounter a business that has gotten some negative press on the web.  And sometimes, it really is undeserved.  Take, for example, the legal firm that once had a client sue them for supposedly overbilling time.  The case was thrown out as having no merit, but the mentions of it on the web remained. And because this client didn’t have a lot of mentions out there on the web, the negative posts were the top things to come up in Google.  Ouch.

 So, how do we overcome those negative listings?  We can’t get them OFF of the web… they are there to stay.  And if we reply to the posts, that just gives them more back links, and thus helps to insure their high ranking.

 No, what we did was to help insure that there were many pieces of content out there on the web on credible sites, all mentioning the client’s name.  Then, we did a bit of back-linking to those posts in various places, to help insure that they would rise in the SE’s. 

I requires a bit of effort, but it can pay off.