Does your social media policy fall short?

If like me, you keep an eye on the trending topics of your business, interesting stories show up. In the world of social media, there were 2 trending topics over the last week. One was the fact that the American Medical Association just created a social media policy for physicians and the other about a medical technician being laid off on the basis of her comments about her supervisor on Facebook (NY Times article).

First to the policy, it is simple, straight forward and still comprehensive. It can be summarized in 5 short statements:

• Separate private and professional presence online
• Respect Doctor-Patient privacy and confidentiality
• Maintain Doctor-Patient relationship online
• Use security settings to the maximize protection for your social media profiles
• Know that your online presence will influence your offline reputation especially true with negative content

This is a great start but it is by no means a complete policy. I would consider it more some guidelines on usage rather than calling a policy. Some hospitals are taking this one step further and making more extensive policies that include aspects such as authenticity, honesty, disclaimers, etc. Good examples are the policies of the Mayo Clinic, Ohio StateUniversity Medical Center, etc.

However, as companies are hurrying towards making and implementing such a policy, the latter trending topic is generating a ground breaking legal case, which is stopping companies in their tracks. What is going on? A medical technician was fired over violating the rule for depicting the company in a negative way on social media (specifically Facebook). National Labor Relations Board has jumped in and said this firing was illegal since employees have the right to talk about the working conditions whether that is at the water cooler, in a bar or even facebook. It is unrealistic to think that barring employees to talk about their company anywhere is an option and even a very restrictive social media policy will not help.

There are five conclusions I would like to draw up:

• The best way to address such a situation is to have an open door policy where unhappy people can go and vent their frustrations to a real human being with no repercussions so they do not have to do this on social media.
• Include a paragraph addressing respect for and defamatory statements about company, co-workers, clients, suppliers, etc.
• Additionally, social media policies should include actions and consequences when the policy is not adhered to.
• Often forgotten, is the fact that you need to make sure employees have read and understood the social media policy to the same extend as the employment policies.
• Finally, employees have to keep in mind that they are also tarnishing their own reputation making these types of remarks and burdening their future employability.

hospitals and their social media policy

I did not think I was going to write so quickly a follow up to my last week’s post on social media in the hospital area, but my interest was peaked this week by a poll I saw via Twitter (@reedsmith).

The polls asked the question whether the organization/hospital had a social media media policy.  The result was somewhat amazing.

72% of the people who answered (25 answers) the poll said they did have a policy.  This number is very high but due to the fact that on average only 1 in 3 has a policy.  The fact that this poll was run through Twitter probably skewed the results.  The users are already on social media and thus somewhat likely to have a policy.

Looking at some publicly published policies, the areas that are covered can be summarized as:

• Clear definition on where the medical facility stands when it comes to social media and what usage during and off work-time.
• Commenting guidelines and rules
  • Focus on positive comments
  • posts with abusive and offensive language will be removed
  • posts with personal attack  will be removed
  • All spam-like posts will be removed
• Blogging guidelines including the use of disclaimers in both directions (medical facility and the commenter)
• Identity and affiliation with the medical facility
• Use of code of ethics including all other applicable policies
• General rules of conduct (add value, be smart, be authentic, etc.)

Though it is great to see that there are good examples of social media policies being put in place?  There are in my opinion 3 major components missing in these types of policies:

• What are the clear guidelines to deal with negative comments?  What is the plan?  Who is the go-to person/department?
• What monitoring is being done to make sure this policy is being “enforced”?
• How has the policy been communicated to the employees?  Just put on the intra-net does not do it.

So as a conclusion, I think that having guidelines for your employees is great, but they need to communicated and monitored effectively so. People must know what can and can not be done and what to do in cases of emergencies.