A Public Company’s Social Media Policy

For those of us who have trouble holding our attention through the reading of a densely worded, multi-page social media policy, Salesforce.com has published an easy to follow example of a social media policy — concisely communicated via a video.  Their employees and anyone else can also view the traditional, text version on SlideShare.

The video below provides an excellent example of a corporate social media policy, explained by Jamie Grenney and Erica Kuhl, of Salesforce.com’s social media team.

Employee Social Media Contribution Risks and Benefits

Salesforce recommends taking a progressive approach to social media policy in order to minimize risks.  At the same time, Salesforce stresses the benefit to getting employees involved in publicly sharing their expert insights.  This is simply good marketing.

Since Salesforce.com is a public company, many of the policy’s rules revolve around not disclosing information that could cause regulatory ire, such as conversations around share price or potential acquisitions.  However, there are also rules that can apply to any company, such as not posting anonymously and, of course, being respectful to one’s audience.  Another good rule is to be respectful of your own company’s brand and not to use your company logo, for example, without explicit permission.

Erica Kuhl mentions in the video that “there’s no undo button with social media”.  While this is always the case with a direct login to a social media account — such as with the personal accounts that this video references — we added a level of content filtering within MediaFunnel for shared, corporate accounts in order to address concerns around employee contributions.

The presence of a Contributor role within MediaFunnel provides the ability for a user with appropriate permissions to modify a social media post before it goes out to the world — or to even prevent a post from going out at all.