Agency principals realize we live in a social world, and are trying to help employees participate in social activities in ways that benefit individuals, the agency and their clients. Agencies can and should use social media to their advantage to help with everything from prospecting, to new business, to attracting great employees. Ultimately, social media presents the opportunity for individual employees to have a real positive impact on the agency brand, and on clients’ brands.
On the negative side, advertising agencies need to have formal social media policies for crisis management. Social media presents risks for individuals, advertising agencies and their clients, because employees active in social media could either purposefully or accidentally damage reputations and brands. Having a social media policy in place can help guard against this risk, setting standards and expectations for online behavior, and instilling a conscious awareness of how quickly a casual remark on a blog can become an Internet-fueled PR firestorm.
Here are some tips for how to create a social media policy for your agency:
Since social media is all about sharing and collaboration, developing your agency’s Social Media Policy should also be a collaborative effort. Start by identifying employees who are your agency’s most active social media participants to help craft the agency’s guidelines. Employee participation and collaboration will help foster a positive culture within your agency and ownership of your agency’s social media policy.
Social media is transparent and all about communication, so your social media guidelines should be well communicated and distributed. Principals should explain that the social media policy is aimed at clarifying best practices and protecting everyone’s best interests. Constant changes in technology necessitate flexible guidelines that can easily evolve and adapt to new innovations; so invite feedback and ongoing recommendations.
Keep the guidelines positive. Focusing on the things employees can do with social media rather than what they can’t do keeps the discussion and the resulting policy more upbeat. Your employees are adults and professionals, so they’ll “get” the need for basic behavioral guidelines.
