It seems more and more organizations are churning out guidelines, policies and codes of conduct for social media use by their employees, both official and not. This is a great development.
As we’ve written before, a good policy will cover off three key points:
- how the organization will conduct itself in social channels;
- how employees will be expected to conduct themselves in social channels; and
- how the public wil be allowed to conduct themselves on social properties owned or curated by the organization.
The Government of Alberta recently joined the movement to define expectations for social media use by public servants and departments (PDF). While they do a fine job of covering off all three of these areas, one of their points related to the first deserves particular praise.
Talk the talk
When discussing how official spokespeople should respond on public-facing social sites, the policy notes, among other things, that they:
must ensure their responses are consistent with messaging approved by the Communications Branch, with actual wording being consistent with the audience or objectives of the site.
The emphasis there is mine. The first part of that clause is pretty standard stuff for government. The latter isn’t.
One of the biggest reasons that organziations, especially those in the public sector, find little traction in social channels is that they bring with them existing habits and, more damningly, messages. Twitter becomes a dumping ground for press release links; Facebook becomes a place to repost key messages as written in the backpocket Q&A documents given to the media relations team.
With that simple little statement, it seems the Government of Alberta has recognized that the same old messages don’t work in social channels. People speaking on behalf of a department or agency need to know the key messages, of course, but they also need to be empowered to speak the language of the channel they are in.
Granted, as with anything else, the proof will be in the proverbial pudding. We’ll have to wait and see how Alberta communicators translate this policy into action. But as far as first steps go, this one’s a doozy.