PatronManager

At the beginning of the social media revolution, organizations treated social media like a newfangled kind of public relations. They hired someone (or got a volunteer) whose job was to be the social media person. That person was the voice of the organization on social media. Many organizations have that right now and it’s a good thing.

However, if that’s all you’re doing you’re not going far enough. Everyone in your organization could be a social media advocate! After all, they are all on social media, or most of them anyway. If you run a theater all of your actors could be an online ambassador for the organization. If you run an orchestra every one of your musicians could do the same. The social in social media means getting everyone in your organization to help build your organization using social media. I’m opposed to the idea of requiring people to do so, but I’m a big advocate of encouraging people.

What this article talks about is that, to do this effectively, you need a social media policy. It’s a set of guidelines or “rules of the road” that you can give to your employees, co-workers, or artistic community so that they know what you expect of them and you don’t run into problems that could’ve been avoided. This article from Spin Sucks — a website for the PR industry — does a fantastic job of laying out many of the things that you should be thinking about as you create your social media policy. In fact there are exactly 21 specific ideas here and I encourage you to read this and let it propel you towards building a social media policy for your organization.