Do you have a Social Media Policy? Do you need one?
I have been exploring and experimenting with Web 2.0 for the past three years, on behalf of the Department of State's Public Diplomacy mission. We have produced over 4 pilot events in Second Life, launched a Ning social network, numerous Facebook pages, in the process of developing a mobile phone game and launching a Twitter/Jaiku elections feed to a select number of posts overseas. These are just a few of our highlights.
We have now approached the time where we need to think about what types of policies and guidelines ("they're only guidelines!") we need to govern the use of social media. Some of the questions we are wrestling with are privacy, PII, line between personal and official capacity (which profile do you use? How and when do you respond?), Smith-Mundt, how do we provide transparency in government, how do we show it is an official site etc.
We know everyone is experimenting with social media. This is great! We need to be able to explore and experiment with new technologies; to see how they work and how best to implement them in our respective agencies. We don't want to stifle innovation. In fact we need to implement a culture that accepts rapid development cycles and makes it acceptable to fail fast. How do we establish this corporate culture?
In order to support these initiatives, we need policies that will provide the boundaries and general rules of engagement. If something happens we need to be able to address the person/organization and not punish the entire community for one person's/organization's mistake. The trick will be in creating a policy that does not stifle the very nature of social media and yet is able to address all of our concerns.
The question is also how do we develop policies and guidelines for things that are moving faster than we can get these things cleared? What balance must be struck between letting a thousand flowers bloom and our respective agency's need for control/security? This will require us to be both visionary and strategic. It will require us to take some risks and make some radical predictions on where it is the Federal Government needs to be. How are we going to engage the American public, businesses, NGOs, foreign governments and non-American publics? How do they want us to engage them? And this doesn't even begin to touch on the fact that we need to not just engage people, but be willing to talk back to them. We need to allow them the freedom of building their communities with us as partners in the conversation.
My question to you is, what are you doing? What lessons learned do you have to share on the development of a social policy? Should we have a Federal Government wide policy or should they be agency specific? I have just completed our initial draft of a Social Media policy for the Department, but it could benefit from some tweaking. I'm looking for all of your insights, suggestions, and ideas on these issues. I can't begin to think of everything! Any sample social media policies you have laying around won't hurt either! ;)
We have now approached the time where we need to think about what types of policies and guidelines ("they're only guidelines!") we need to govern the use of social media. Some of the questions we are wrestling with are privacy, PII, line between personal and official capacity (which profile do you use? How and when do you respond?), Smith-Mundt, how do we provide transparency in government, how do we show it is an official site etc.
We know everyone is experimenting with social media. This is great! We need to be able to explore and experiment with new technologies; to see how they work and how best to implement them in our respective agencies. We don't want to stifle innovation. In fact we need to implement a culture that accepts rapid development cycles and makes it acceptable to fail fast. How do we establish this corporate culture?
In order to support these initiatives, we need policies that will provide the boundaries and general rules of engagement. If something happens we need to be able to address the person/organization and not punish the entire community for one person's/organization's mistake. The trick will be in creating a policy that does not stifle the very nature of social media and yet is able to address all of our concerns.
The question is also how do we develop policies and guidelines for things that are moving faster than we can get these things cleared? What balance must be struck between letting a thousand flowers bloom and our respective agency's need for control/security? This will require us to be both visionary and strategic. It will require us to take some risks and make some radical predictions on where it is the Federal Government needs to be. How are we going to engage the American public, businesses, NGOs, foreign governments and non-American publics? How do they want us to engage them? And this doesn't even begin to touch on the fact that we need to not just engage people, but be willing to talk back to them. We need to allow them the freedom of building their communities with us as partners in the conversation.
My question to you is, what are you doing? What lessons learned do you have to share on the development of a social policy? Should we have a Federal Government wide policy or should they be agency specific? I have just completed our initial draft of a Social Media policy for the Department, but it could benefit from some tweaking. I'm looking for all of your insights, suggestions, and ideas on these issues. I can't begin to think of everything! Any sample social media policies you have laying around won't hurt either! ;)
Tags: gov20, government 2.0, privacy, social media, social media policy
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Emi Whittle on -
It would be great if the government could just trust people to NOT do stupid things..... unfortunately, I think that idea has already been fractured a time or two.
I think a policy has to walk a fine line between dictating what people can do with their "personal" lives and their actual professional lives. I think that any policy that regulates appropriate behavior "in person" should have some applicability to anything a person does that represents their professional life or professional employer.
I think that any organization, virtual group, website, webservice, etc., that is NOT an official government-run entity should clearly identify itself as such.
As an employee of a government contractor, I believe I am responsible for anything I say or write in any public forum, whether I am acting in an official capacity at that moment or not ----- if I am making statements that are related to my work, then I am liable for those statements as an employee.
That said, if I am making statements about my work, in a non-work forum, for my own edification and stress relief, as long as I am not violating company nor federal confidentiality rules, then I should be "safe" in doing so.....
I would be very interested in reading about the main points of your policy draft. I agree - this will be an interesting up and coming arena!!!
Fascinating!!!
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Permalink Reply by GovLoop on -
Interesting. What Ning network did you build? I'd love to check it out.
Supposedly, the UK has a social media policy after their "Civil Serf" blog scandal where a young high-level work blogged about the problems with the gov't. Supposedly, the policy was basically "don't be stupid." Additionally, corporations such as IBM and Sun supposedly have policies that describe use of social media and how to identify.
I would like to see some general guidelines at a federal level not at an agency level. If I were to write the guidelines, they would be straight-forward and one page. And say "don't be stupid." People have an idea what they can and cannot say at an informal gathering (neighborhood potluck/happy hour). If they are a spy, they shouldn't say it. They shouldn't bash their employer, as any one at the party could be a journalist and leak it. But for most roles they are allowed to say who they are and their opinions. I believe the online space follows that line of conduct.
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Permalink Reply by Lovisa Williams on -
Check out . This is our new website on Ning. I appreciate everyone's comments since I know this is not an easy nut to crack. And of course it is nice to I am not the only one working this issue.
I have heard that IBM and Sun have internal policies regarding the use of social media. I would love to get copies of them.
I actually created a checklist for my agency to use when considering using social media. It is now almost a year old and things have changed! It was more or less the "don't be stupid" checklist but also included a reiteration of not posting pictures of our buildings, not discussing the details of our IT networks etc. Perhaps we only need to beef that checklist up.
But I am hearing more and more the question of whether or not you should use your personal profile, the questions of privacy and information collection and a number of other legal and ethical questions. As much as I would love to say we can handle it all with a better checklist, I fear we may need something more than that. I would just hate to lose the flexibility we have by over reacting.
Perhaps if we implement mandatory training for all employees about how to use social media, what to be aware of, and assist them to being sensitive about the information they post it may give them the guidelines they need without restricting them to the point of not being able to use social media effectively. It is similar as to how we have made it mandatory for all employees to undergo annual information security training. Perhaps this is just another module added to this course. And if you are expected to create unique content for your agency then you may need to attend a more thorough course about what to post, how to develop and create content for social media sites, what it means to be a Community Manager.
We are thinking of defining a Community Manager as the person who has responsibility over all of the content posted by the agency, moitors what the community is posting, rejects UGC that does not conform to the Terms of Use and most importantly is responsible for participating and sometimes leading community discussions.
Thanks for your insights and keep them coming! I love reading your ideas and comments!
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Permalink Reply by Emma Dozier on -
When I went to the Blog World Expo in Vegas a month ago, one of the main metaphors everyone used for commenting (and by extension, interacting with anyone in any 2.0 environment) was the "you're a guest in someone's house" metaphor.
That is, "You can come into my house, have a nice chat, even have an intense debate, but you can't trash my stuff, and you have to clean up after yourself." Basically, "don't be stupid."
A lot of the presenters/attendees at the expo were entrepreneurs trying to work from and get their blog to work from them. But one really interesting panel was from the corporate bloggers at Kodak, Dell, Yahoo and Facebook. They talked at length about a bigger corporate strategy and how important it was (preaching to the choir, with you, I know :))
They all had commenting guidelines (and by extension, guidelines for individual users on 2.0 channels other than blogs) that included:
*moderated comments (in some cases, after they're live, in some, before)
*allowing for negative feedback that needs to be heard, but
*not allowing libelous statements
Another interesting community/panel at the expo was the Milblogging community. Similar to State, DoD has huge OPSEC (goodness, I'm not even sure what this acronym stands for, how sad is that for jargon? Operation Secrecy perhaps? Basically, you're not allowed to give away war secrets like locations, strategy, timing, etc) guidelines that are there for very good reason - to protect our Troops.
Some of the Milbloggers (active-duty Soldiers, wives, friends, anyone connected to the military community really) at this conference expressed concern that their voices were being stifled. But most seemed pleased that their chain of command allowed them to express their views to the world within what they saw as important OPSEC guidelines.
The challenge of "training" every member of the military for proper SocNet interaction though - this coming from the "Boots-on-the-Ground" bloggers themselves - is that you can't go through every "what-if" situation with every soldier. You can only hope that each individual person will make the right choice, and will respect their responsibility to keep sensitive information close to themselves.
One of the most interesting things about the Milblogging community was how supportive everyone was of each other. Everyone reads each other's blogs and everyone shared a unique culture that is the Military lifestyle. One quote I typed verbatim at the conference from CJ from A Soldier's Perspective:
"I never looked at myself as anything other than a Soldiers...It is an awesome responsibility having that information and guarding it...I owe that to my leadership to make sure I stand by that."
So while we can't trust that everyone won't do something stupid, as Emi says, we can build up the best possibile culture within our work environment. Giving employees a voice is more likely to make them respect their organization more, and represent them well on teh Interwebs, than keeping them locked up, quiet, and angry. (Shel Holtz's book, Corporate Conversations, brings this point home, in a general internal communications strategy frame.)
Woo! That was a lot of info. Don't mean to hog the forum - I just get so excited! Can't wait to hear more perspectives.
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Permalink Reply by Kate Yemelyanov on -
An agency's social media policy, just like its policies on other outside activities by staff, should be rooted in its mission and aligned with its published standards of conduct for employees. On the latter issue, there's a useful piece from Dan Lohrmann at Government Technology on linking real-life conduct to cyber conduct. On the former, the biggest challenge in integrating use of web 2.0 technology with an agency's mission is that the people within an agency who actually have the authority to set and interpret the mission are not the people who understand web 2.0. If these folks aren't fully turned on to what web 2.0 can do for them, what incentive do they have to adopt a social media policy?
As a non-IT professional, let me turn the question around. What are you and other GovLoop IT folks doing to educate agency decision-makers about the potential of web 2.0 for advancing your agency mission? What are you doing to support the efforts of program and operational staff who take the initiative to integrate social networking into their work, like the people who developed the ning site you mention?
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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Rosas on -
I would also be interested in seeing sample policies - we recently implemented a wiki and there has been discussion about what is appropriate to post to this kind of community. The example that came up had to do with RFPs in development - we decided they should *not* be posted to the wiki, nor should any other highly sensitive information. We did develop some "rules of engagement" for the wiki. I have pinged a couple of listservs, but haven't heard from anyone or seen any existing policies. I do think policy has to be tailored to individual organizations' environments and cultures - our approach currently is to develop policies on an "as needed" basis and stay as flexible as possible. We are experimenting with internal implementations rather than focusing on public-facing initiatives at this point.
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Permalink Reply by GovLoop on
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Check out this post and links to the Sun and IBM documents.
http://catahoula.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/guidelines/
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Permalink Reply by Bill Radford on -
We are having the same types of discussions in our office.
While we don't have any standards or policies documented yet, as we taking things pretty slowly when it comes to implementing anything Enterprise 2.0 related. Our goal is to implement the technology internally before opening things up to other agencies and/or the public. Even with this being the case, we are struggling with what we should document as acceptable standards.
Some want to see guidelines similar to Carlin's "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television", while others really want to allow the community to police itself. I feel that we will probably end up somewhere in the middle, using the "Act Like You are a Guest in My House" rules, but I'm just not sure how long it will take us to get there.
It would be nice if we could have some general guidelines for the entire government, and then, if necessary, the guidelines could be tweaked for each agency.
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Permalink Reply by Emma Dozier on
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Supposedly one or more Presidential candidates has ideas/strategy/platform with Social Networking. Hopefully they can lead everyone in the same direction we all want to be headed.
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Permalink Reply by Tom Vannoy on -
I agree Emma, it's been exciting to see both campaigns use Web2.0 technologies throughout their effort to gain THE office. One would hope that their experience doing so will lead them toward seeing what is possible within government agencies. Heck, even having somewhere to communicate with other bureau's under the same department office would be a small step in the right direction. The increased coordination and relationship building that would occur as a result is limitless.
The trick is how to balance the user's experience and freedom of expression against our somewhat unique security needs. I've talked to people in the terrorism/security field and they have concerns over sites like LinkedIn, facebook, probably govloop because they feel federal workers may be targeted for recruitment based on information on the sites. I think that' s a little overboard, however there may be the small minority of people that make themselves vulnerable in some way.
From an overall rules of behavior model there are some good standards out there we can build off of - my preference would be for the users of this type of technology to determine the rules for all gov'ers before someone else that's never utilized sites like this tries to do so.
Lovisa - a question for you - it sounds as if you are very far along the path (further than most I am familiar with), how is it that happened? Did you have an executive sponsor with a vision? We are still struggling to get off the ground but we are working hard at selling the benefits to those that have the power to say 'yes, make it so.'.
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Permalink Reply by Lovisa Williams on
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This is by no means an easy set of questions to address. I think there are a couple reasons why we have been able to gain some traction. And believe me, it hasn't been easy and it is a constant battle. I would attribute our successes to a couple of factors. Public Diplomacy's mission has always been to be where the people are. We are tasked with engaging people on their turf so to speak. We are also used to working with the public and thinking ahead in terms risk mitigation whether it be a public speech, a press conference, an event in Second Life or one of us writing on a blog. We are trained to think about the risks and we have policies in place (prior to Web 2.0) that give us a certain amount of freedom and yet ensure we don't end up placing the Department or the Federal Government in an embarassing position.
We regularly providing briefings and small executive sessions to discuss emerging technologies. We cover everything from industry trends to tools we have identified as having potential for Public Diplomacy. We stress that just because you have a cool new tool doesn't mean you should use it. We still stress the basics. Knowing your environment and your target audience. For us, old media is still just part of the toolbox we use. There is no 80/20 rule any more, but that doesn't mean you throw out the old rules. It just means the game got more complicated.
Another thing that has helped us be successful is we have gone out of our way to think strategicly about what we wanted to accomplish and how best to lay the ground work for the future. We have been working closely with our IT budget people on the next IT Strategic Plan. We plan to include the framework for the acceptance for social media at the Department. This will set the stage for Department wide acceptance and will assist us with future budget justifications.
If it had not been for our Senior Management in Public Diplomacy we would not have had the support and leadership to explore and pilot these technologies. They have also been very supportive in ensuring we were able to attend a number of private industry conferences in California. In addition to just attending conferences, we make it a point to go to Silicon Valley. We talk directly to not just the big named companies, but more importantly we engage those companies who are smaller, potentially riskier and who are moving forward. We care less about what is out there now and more about what is coming in the near future, what other countries are doing, and establishing collaborative partnerships that will help guide us to the most effective tools for engaging various audiences all over the world. This investment of time and money to cultivate these relationships has been pivotal in allowing us to bring in outside expertise, provide new insights and ensure that although the Department may not be cutting edge that we have first hand knowledge of what cutting edge and beyond is.
Unfortunately, I don't have the magic potion to make everyone love us and say yes to us. The short answer is build strong business cases with examples, educate any one who will listen, find advocates who will talk you up, establish first hand knowledge and become experts in what it is you are promoting, identify and build partnerships with those in the private sector who can assist you, and last but not least don't give up.
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Permalink Reply by Tom Vannoy on
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Lovisa,
Thanks for the insight. I applaud your efforts and may come back and contact you in the future to mine your insight on business case justification.
Again - thanks for sharing.
Tom
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