PR In Canada

You can run, but you can’t hide from social media as it is everywhere.  Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have dominated the headlines for the last few months as just about every public relations firm is launching or looking to launch a social media practice to claim their piece of the pie.  Not to mention keep up with client requests as they also want to stay one step ahead of their competition or unfortunately in some cases simply want to look cool and launch a social media campaign.

As practitioner it is also your responsibility to ensure that you are giving the best possible advice to your clients which is why you should also be at a minimum experimenting with social media.  As I’ve said before I don’t think that every company should have a corporate blog, after all if your company has never been able to be consistent with a newsletter than you will also fail with a blog.  You can do a simple step, such as commenting on other blogs where you can add something meaningful to the conversation, or set up a Twitter account and “retweet.”

If your company is going to allow employees to blog, use Twitter or other social media tools one thing to consider is setting up a social media guideline.  A document to help employees understand any guidelines, restrictions as the last thing that you’d want is to be fired for blogging.

Niall Cook from Hill & Knowlton is looking for help to help the firm write their social media guidelines. I have noticed that a few other large corporations have also set up social media guidelines, Intel has their guideline here,  IBM here,  and ESPN added one after they had a public backlash.

Categories: Features
Tags: Social Media, Social Media Guideline