Today, Telstra have publicly published their social media guardrails for staff. While these aren’t the first (sorry, Dan Oakes at the SMH, you got that one wrong) corporate guidelines on social media for an Australian company (I’ve helped with a few), they are certainly the biggest company to make them public.
Telstra Group Managing Director Public Policy and Communications, David Quilty, has an extensive blog post explaining the document and its implemetation and implications. It’s worth a read.
With the highly publicised brouhaha at Telstra over Leslie Nassar’s Fake Stephen Conroy Twitter account, and the dramatic increase in corporate interest in social media as a way to improve business practices and connectedness with stakeholder communities, the guidelines are not before time.
With the benefit of hindsight, the Leslie Nassar incident would have been far more manageable had the document been in place before he was exposed as Fake Stephen Conroy. At the very least, all the people calling for Telstra’s head would have been able to see where and why any perception of improper behavior had happened.
Telstra released the guidelines to me late last week when they were in final draft. I made a couple of comments on them to Telstra staff then – those comments were insubstantial and essentially gave my support to their approach.
Overall, they are a well-considered, useful document for use in a large, publicly traded organisation that needs to preserve a certain level of perceived professionalism amongst its staff that choose to use social media in a business context. They very much reflect the state of similar documents in place at other organisations. If anything, they are longer than I would like, but I’m not the boss of Telstra.
The advice I give any client, no matter how small, that wishes to use social media in a business context is that they must have rules of engagement for staff and management to follow. I have a core framework that I take clients through to help them build a policy appropriate to their business. Often, these rules simply extend existing organisational policy on proper behavior. It’s very much the case with the Telstra document.
So, well done Telstra for the guardrails. Well done even more for making them public.
