The High Price of Social Media Risk Management - Alexandra ...

by Alexandra Samuel??|?? 4:32 PM October 19, 2012

In the event of uproar, please invoke social media policy.

That's the in-case-of-emergency sign that might as well hover over the desk of any communications manager, as the latest social media crisis reminds us. This week, it's The New York Times that finds itself in hot water, after contributor Andrew Goldman responded to a critical tweet with a reply that public editor Margaret Sullivan aptly characterized as "needlessly rude and insulting."

The Times responded by invoking its social media standards ? even though it has no written social media policy. As Times associate managing editor Philip B. Corbett wrote in his memo about the incident:

"[Y]ou are a Times journalist, and your online behavior should be appropriate for a Times journalist. Readers will inevitably associate anything you post on social media with The Times."

Working from this principle, the Times suspended Goldman from his weekly column for the next four weeks.

Right result ? wrong reasons. And doubly worrying if emulated by those who see the Times as the gold standard in media.

Yes, Goldman needs to be held accountable for his tweet. It was written in his capacity as a Times journalist, speaking directly to a Times reader, and in that context, would be reasonably seen as part of the Times' collective voice.

But it's one thing to hold a journalist (or any employee) accountable for what they post about their work (or in conversation with a customer). It's quite another to ? as Corbett puts it ? "always treat Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms as public activities."

After all, like most of us, journalists now live much of their lives online. And while some people patrol the boundary between church and state by maintaining separate social media profiles for their personal and professional lives, many of us thrive on the holistic perspectives and relationships that can develop when people tweet, blog or Facebook as their own true selves, 24/7.

In the course of that 24/7 online life, there are moments when you ? or one of your employees or colleagues ? may not be on brand or on message. Maybe your sales director will tweet something unflattering about a purchase she made at a store that just happens to be on your client list; perhaps your corporate recruiter will lampoon a political candidate for views that are shared by at least some of your prospective hires.

Seen through the lens of an approach like that of The New York Times, those posts are all potentially problematic. In content or tone, they diverge from the voice your company is trying to project online, and possibly expose you to a backlash from clients, customers or employees. No wonder companies try to hedge against that possibility with overly broad policies that subject the entirety of an employee's social media presence to the abstract standard of propriety or brand alignment.

But that kind of risk management comes at too high a price. For the same reason most social media sites explicitly disavow responsibility for the content that they host, employers would do well to embrace written policies that make it clear they don't police their employees' online presences. In the absence of a written policy that sets out the narrow circumstances in which employees will be held accountable for their online posts, the employer may be held accountable for anything. When New York Times advertisers spot tweets by journalists that rudely insult their products, will they now conclude that the Times considers those tweets "appropriate"?

The greater cost comes from the ambiguity of what is, in fact, appropriate. A social media policy ? even an unwritten one ? that holds employees accountable for everything they post can lead to a chilling effect: inhibiting them from making use of a powerful channel for authentic, real-time communication. That's bad strategy for an employer, and even worse news for us as online citizens. It's in all of our interests to ensure that a good chunk of online conversation remains outside the editorial purview of managers who are policing content for its brand and message alignment.

And yet our habit of treating social media policy as a form of disaster-proofing leads us down just this path: a path where vague or overly-broad policies are embraced as a way of safeguarding against any and all unfortunate online conversations. As Goldman's misfire demonstrates, a much narrower policy can do the job ? and do it much better.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/samuel/2012/10/the-high-price-of-social-media.html

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