Avoiding a $40M Tweet: 7 Tips for Making a Solid Social Media Policy

On August 7, Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent out what may have turned out to be the most expensive tweet ever. Following his tweet, in which he said he was considering taking Tesla private, Musk stirred up a storm among investors. The tweet caused the share price of Silicon Valley-based Tesla to drop dramatically and attracted a series of lawsuits from enraged investors. But Musk's tweet also attracted the attention of another group that business leaders cross at their peril: the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Following almost two months of consideration, the SEC sued Musk and Tesla. The resulting settlement cost each party $20 million, and Musk was forced to resign as Tesla's chairman.

Clearly, Tesla needed a social media policy, one that Musk should have abided by. While you may not be Musk and your company may not be Tesla, this incident shows exactly why your company needs a social media policy--and why it needs to make sure that its employees follow those requirements. Fortunately, help is easy to find as executives at other companies are happy to help.

For example, it's important to know what role you want your employees to play when they're using social media, according to Cheryl Snapp Conner, CEO of public relations firm SnappConner PR. In some cases, for example, you may want them to represent the company on Facebook and Twitter. However, in other cases, you just want to make sure they don't say anything that would hurt the company. Snapp Conner also classifies blogs as social media and said that you need to include them in your policy, too.

Snapp Conner said that it's important that your social media policy be written down. "It's important that it be part of the employment contract," she said. "It should be part of the general employee handbook."

She also said that it's important that you discuss the social media policy with your employees so that they can see the reason for it, and understand why they can't just say anything they want on social media. "It can bring up things that people might not have thought about," Snapp Conner added.

When you're deciding what to include in your social media policy, it's important to think about all the ways your employees can represent your company. But it's also important to think of the ways that your employees will interact on social media when they're not representing your company.

"It's been my experience that, most of the time when these policies go sideways, it's because employees have no idea what the policy means," said Ryan Schram, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of online media marketing company IZEA. "Lawyers do what lawyers do best and put courtroom language around the policy." That can be difficult for laypeople to interpret.

Schram said that means you need to explain the policy to your employees. "A little is common sense," he said. "It's about transparency and about what we expect of our team members."

7 Social Media Policy Must-Haves

So, what actually goes into a social media policy? To some extent, it depends on the company and on what you expect of your employees. But here are seven points that are common to most policies:

1. Transparency: Employees need to make it clear when they are speaking on behalf of the company and when they're speaking for themselves. Simply having a personal Facebook page often isn't enough to make that distinction clear.

2. Protection of company information: You can't let employees discuss the inner workings of your company, disclose trade secrets, or discuss information that may be helpful to competitors. You may need to explain to them what this means. For example, engineers love to discuss technology online, especially new and emerging technology. That's fine, but discussing how your company is using that technology by describing projects you're currently working on is not.

3. Don't break the law: If your company or profession has a code of conduct, then follow that, too. This may mean that employees should be able to confirm that what they're saying passes the test with your company's legal staff.

4. Be professional and responsible with others: You can't afford to have your employees be rude to others, to disparage your competitors or your company, or to conduct themselves in similar types of negative behavior. Backlash from these kinds of activities can easily spill over from an individual to the organization, and that can hurt the company.

5. Don't steal or misappropriate intellectual property (IP): This means don't plagiarize the work of others, post copyrighted images, or use others' IP without permission. You may need to explain that this limits the use of memes on social media, too.

6. Be accurate: Edit your work for typos, spelling errors, and factual errors, and correct any that turn up later. And if you're making an arguement, make sure you can back up claims and that you're able to cite sources if required.

7. Make social media account ownership clear: If employees are using an account created by your company, then make sure they know that the company owns the account and the followers that go with it. The company also owns any content that's created on such accounts, and they own responsibility for it, too.

Consequences of Not Following Policy

Once you've created your company's social media policy, you need to require that all employees receive a copy of it, that it's inserted into the employee manual, and that all employees (including the CEO) sign for it, acknowledging that they have read and understood it.

Then you need to explain to your employees what will happen if they don't follow the new social media policy guidelines. Best Buy is very clear about what the consequences are in its social media policy:

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"Just in case you are forgetful or ignore the guidelines above, here's what could happen. You could: get fired (and it's embarrassing to lose your job for something that's so easily avoided), get Best Buy in legal trouble with customers or investors, or cost us the ability to get and keep customers."

This is about as clear as it can be, and it's similar to the consequences that other companies should list. When you implement such a policy, it needs to apply to everyone across the board. You can't make exceptions for some people, and you have to have human resources (HR) procedures in place for deciding what steps to take if the policy is not followed.

One great way to do this is to build or buy a short employee training course that covers appropriate social media behavior. This could be worked in during your annual harrassment and workplace ehtics training. Providing real-world advice and workshop examples is key to helping employees understand not only what you're trying to get across but also how important it is to the company.

Social Media Policies: Benefits and Examples

But, before you decide to swear off social media, also remember that it can be a powerful means of telling your company's story. How powerful? Snapp Conner explains by taking a look at the great job T-Mobile CEO John Legere (@JohnLegere) has done with raising his company's profile through Twitter. This wasn't Legere acting on his own. It was a concerted social effort, likely backed by several professionals and powerful marketing automation tools focused on social media.

In addition to Best Buy's social media policy just discussed, there are other good examples of social media policies that you can use as inspiration to craft your own. Recruiting software firm Workable provides a social media policy template, which is a set of general guidlines that you can customize for your own company. Social media recruiting platform HireRabbit discusses actual social media policies from companies such as the GAP, Hewlett-Packard, and The Los Angeles Times. And employee advocacy and social selling platform EveryoneSocial discusses seven more social media policies, including ones from Coca-Cola, Dell, Ford Motor Company, Intel, Nordstrom, and the US Air Force.

Without proper guidance, social media can be a real minefield. Properly utilized, however, it's a powerful marketing tool that's indispensible in this day and age for most organizations, especially smaller businesses. Crafting a working social media policy is key to ensuring your company leverage's social media's benefits and not its pitfalls; however, getting a solid policy created may start with IT, legal, and HR, but in the end it needs support form the organization as a whole in order to function.