Intro: You are a member of a very special and select group of political savvy individuals within the organisation. You’ve been chosen to represent the Company via the medium of “social media”. You are part of a new breed (a group, which senior management have no idea how to handle) yet we need you to ensure you represent our brand in the correct manner, but without compromising your “hip”, “cool” and “trendy” personality.

Why Guidelines?: It only takes a single quote via social media, such as a “tweet” to cause mayhem and reduce the value of our share price. We have a small idea about your sexual and personal habits and need to ensure you keep them private. A real life example from Vodafone saw a Tweet sent to all their UK followers. It said:

“VodafoneUK is fed up of dirty homo's and is going after beaver”

We could take the time to break this down, but feel it is pretty self explanatory. It may be a new sales strategy, but we doubt it. We need to avoid such situations, so please follow these guidelines.

Corporate Guidelines: •As Davina, or Bo Selecta’s Leigh Francis would say: “We’re live! Please don’t say f*ck or bugger”. This is true for any tweets we send out. Do not swear! Even “bum”, “willy”, “poo poo” and “fart” are not allowed.•Be courteous. That’s polite. At all times. Even if the customer tweeting is a complete tosser. One misplaced word and they will spread it like wildfire.•Don’t flirt! even if the other person’s profile picture looks hot and you fancy the pants off them; you’re here to do a job, not to get laid.•Ensure, at all times, you have the right account selected on your Tweetdeck (or other quite confusing Twitter dashboard, cockpit thingy) before you send anything.•If in doubt, ask Tommy Twanker (Social Media Guru) and he’ll help you.•Other than that, be yourself. Imagine you are talking to your Grandma and you’ll be fine.

What if something goes wrong?: Should anything untoward happen that makes the Company look a bit silly we will do a number of things:• We’ll evaluate the situation with our very limited knowledge of online reputation management and social media and over react and panic.• We’ll have to sack someone. It doesn’t matter who, but the more senior the better. The people out in social media land will see we are serious and feel satisfied and happy. Most of them aren’t very nice people.• We’ll expose our agency and apportion all blame to them. They’re full of crap anyway, and this will divert any negative attention away from us.• We’ll make a much bigger deal about it online than we need to, and this will flood Twitter, Facebook and blogs etc. It will also give us a natural search rankings issue, where we’ll have to pay top dollar for some SEO guru living 5 years behind the rest of us to sort it out.• As a last resort, we’ll claim whatever happens as a really clever viral campaign. And say things like “All PR is good PR.”

Please ensure you are familiar and understand these guidelines, and circulate them amongst your peers.

And remember. We all know a Twanker!

Twankers Corporate Social Media Guidelines Feb 2010

http://twankers.co.uk