Social Media Policies; not just for Businesses Anymore

As social media consultants, one of the things we do at DragonSearch is to help our clients develop a social media policy for the company and their employees. We have created a seven plus page document that discusses as many of the needed concerns, issues, and possibilities that are relevant for a business social media policy and their employees. After all, social media networking is social.. so the more people involved, the more social it will be. However, every business, whether they are active in marketing on the social level or not, should at least be discussing what they find acceptable for their employees. No one wants to find out they need a policy after an employee tweets all the company secrets or some other social blunder.

What About Those Social Media Blunders?

There was a really great article in Social Times this week by Andrew Rosen about protecting one’s self from social media remorse.  I thought it was a really needed article because I have had many of the same conversations with people about the very issue and other related things like integration of our public selves through social media.   As more and more of our lives, or history and our personalities gets online though social media interactions, the number of blunders or awkward situations will continue to grow.  Of course, we are all human and mistakes will be made , but now it’s really really public and often, once you hit send, you can’t get it all back! But the article talks about what to do after you have blunder, not how to avoid the blunder in the first place.

So I started thinking about my almost 10 years of being all over the place online and honestly there is only one major blunder that I wish did not happen. In the same span of years, I have taken down one blog post, edited one cousin on FB, and back down from one discussion.  Not a bad track record, I think. So I started thinking about why I don’t have a major issue with so much of this stuff… (more…)