Love ’em or hate ’em, policies are important documents necessary for safeguarding the organization internally and externally. Sharing information and knowledge is so vital to today’s worker. However, companies must consider developing and implementing social media policies as the company rolls out social media tools and permissions to its workforce. A quick Google search for social media policies results in thousands of results. Jennifer Bull’s blog, Good Company – Social Media, Internal Communications and Leadership Best Practices, offers up sound information and a few links to corporate social media policies by companies such as IBM, Kodak and Intel.

There is no one-size-fits-all social media solution and policy for organizations. Policies and social media practice within an organization must fit the business model and desired health of the organization. What works for manufacturers won’t work for healthcare and vice versa; what works for large business won’t work for mid-sized and small businesses. To ensure your social media policy and practice works for your organization, a good best practice is to select a small group of employees to be ‘first adopters’ at your company. As you develop your social media policy, audit what other companies are doing. Involve your employees as you develop the social media policy, to help ensure policy buy-in. Share the policy among a larger group of employees, ask for feedback during content development. Remember the WIIFM factor. Every employee will be concerned, first and foremost, what’s in it for me. You won’t make everyone happy, but involving employees and making adjustments will help ease any tensions and reduce dissatisfaction.

I caution: Be sure to select people from across the generations at at all company levels to be your first adopters. Seems today, everyone is involved with social media in their personal lives. Look for employees active on WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and/or several of the hundreds of social applications available. People of all ages and with a variety of influence are using social media as a form of outlet and connection. Exercising caution in your initial attempt is important, but adopt a sensible, all-inclusive approach at the outset. Be very wary of launching a social media initiative using senior managers and executive leaders to the exclusion of everyone else. You won’t build trust or make any company friends using that approach! After all, trusted friends are essential to making any social media platform work. If you severely exclude, then you’ll end up spending more time putting out fires than developing social media policies and best practices.

As you develop and implement your social media policy, remember to keep the document organic. Address the issue of mistakes up-front. If your workforce mindset is healthy and there’s a decent level of trust and safety, then your staff will know mistakes are expected; after all, that’s how we learn. People are flawed and will make innocent or uninformed mistakes. Be wary of severe punishment for truly simple errors; don’t give your workforce any reason for throwing coworkers ‘under the bus.’

Some important questions to address:

• How many communities will your organization have?
• Who serves as community managers?
• What do you do when employees misuse social media at work?
• How will your internal and corporate communications, public relations, and marketing departments work together, to ensure your organization will not suffer a PR and marketing nightmare?
• What goes in your list of FAQs?
• What limiters will you place on corporate (internal and/or external) social media use?

Unsure where to start? Study the social media policies found on Jennifer Bull’s blog and search the corporate sites of Marriott, Coca Cola, Clorox, Qualcomm and EMC (to name just a few) to give you a few ideas regarding topics to cover for your organization’s social media initiative.

Once in place, social media at your organization means, the sky’s the limit for a workplace culture of knowledge sharing, trust-building, learning, engagement, innovation and creativity that many will envy!

Read the blog post Before your company starts with social media, read this by Jennifer Bull, president of Tribe, Inc. and learn more about starting your social media policy