Personal vs Professional in Social Media

I am back home after having spent two long summer months in Europe. I have been embarrassingly disconnected, but my social media reflections haven't been completely switched off though. For example, even if I would have wanted, I couldn't have missed the Facebook scandal that filled the media for a couple of days when I was in Sweden.

In Sweden EVERYONE is on Facebook. And so are the employees at the National Immigration Office. The scandal was about an employee that had published a "what's on your mind"-update with a racist undertone. This was seen by another employee at the immigration office, communicated to the direction, and the racist-accused employee was now threatened to lose his job. The man said in interviews that he did not understand why the phrase was experienced as racist. He was also shocked over all this attention that this little meaningless text got.

Well,

1. Things are not longer what they are, they are what they seem
   
2. One person does not get to chose what's meaningless and what's not. Loads of people chose together what they find interesting and meaningless
   
3. And at last, times have changed and our private and professional persona has merged.

No Marketing in Social Media Marketing

I think I am going to close this "policy week" (that I am quite happy to leave behind for a while) with a cool thing I read in Rebecca Krause-Hardie's blog archive. I was looking around for policy posts and found an interview that Rebecca made with Jo Johnson, Digital Marketing Manager at the London Symphony Orchestra. Read the whole post because it is an interesting interview with a serious and obviously very skillful social media manager. Here I just want to underline what caught my "policy eye".

The LSO has successfully built a social media communication with over 13000 Facebook fans and more than 10.000 followers on Twitter. When Rebecca in the interview asks Jo if they have a policy or a strategy for their social media marketing at the LSO, Jo answers that after having started without a policy she and a colleague wrote down

what social media was, how they were using it and what benefits it had, to answer the questions that the bosses had started asking.

When they then were writing some rules for themselves and the people involved, they came up with something like:

"…remember that you are the LSO and everything you say will be viewed as official', 'no swearing or nudity', 'don't drink and tweet' and 'NO MARKETING!!". 

Social Media Policy for the Performing Arts sector II

Yesterday I started to examine Social Media Policy by listing some thoughts for the Performing Arts sector to consider. Today, I have been doing some screening and looking at different companies' social media policies. Here are some policy points that can be useful for the performing arts sector:

Before writing our Social Media Policy we should consider that:

• There is a big circulation of people in the performing arts sector. The policy has to take that into account.
  
• Many performing arts professionals are depending on their personal brands. Don't make a policy that prevents them from developing their own brands in their own network activities; they are depending on them for future engagements.
  
• When we decide to implement a social media strategy in our organization we strive for a viral effect and want our information to travel beyond our websites. We have to accept that we will not be able to control everything that is said about us. A policy is not about restrictions, but guidelines!
  

Social Media Policy for the Performing Arts sector I

Today I will take a look at Social Media Policies. A policy is a guideline instituted to avoid negative behavior, or to guide positive behavior towards a desired outcome. A social media policy is intended to give employees guidelines of how to act on social networking sites, both as an employee for the company and as a private person at home.

Mark van Bree, a Dutch public relation practitioner working in Chicago, made a survey in December last year about the social media use in orchestras. There were only 15 orchestras participating in the survey so the sample is not very big, but the survey shows that a majority of the orchestras do not have an internal social media policy and that 40% do not consider that they need one. Van Bree upholds the importance of implementing a policy and how that easily can be done when renewing the freelancers’ contracts.

There are however discussions both for and against Social Media policies on the internet , so we really have to ask ourselves if our performing art organizations should implement an internal Social Media Policy or not, and what we can gain from it.