Yesterday, Search Engine Journal posted an excellent article by Matt Leonard about why (larger) companies need social media guidelines for their employees.  Now at SEO Group and The Ocean Agency, we have some basic guidelines, but ours are more along the lines of Zappos - “be smart about what you put on the web”. 

On the other hand, bigger companies (we’re talking at least a couple hundred employees) have different issues to deal with.  There may be trade secrets, legal issues, and other questions to answer about what employees are putting out there online, so creating a document that details the “rules of engagement” can be the ounce of prevention that prevents future disasters.  There are few key questions to ask before creating these rules of engagement:

• Language - is your industry conservative or not?  This affects the type of language you and your employees use when representing the company online.  For instance, I can say “That’s a damn good website, no SEO fails there.” while perhaps a financial consulting firm would not want their employees using the same language while representing them.
• Legal - any copyrights, trade secrets, patents, etc. should be addressed and your employees should know what they can and cannot disclose.
• Learning - is there any training your employees will need before they get started representing your company on the social web?
• Launch time - do employees know what will be expected of their participation in social media?  Do they know what they have to do daily/weekly/monthly?  Providing some kind of checklist or ideas and examples for them can be very helpful.

Check out the article for a great list of social media guidelines from some of the world’s biggest brands - and if you are currently creating a social media guideline for your company, email us (or Twitter - @SEOGroup) and see how we can help!