With a presence in 206 countries, drafting a social media policy must be a challenge for a company like Coca-Cola.
By the way, Coca-Cola does not call it ‘a policy’ but ‘social media principles’ and recently replaced older guidelines by new ones that fit on 3 pages.
There are principles about what the company as a whole is committed to do in the social media space (transparency, disclosure etc.), principles for official spokes persons who have to go through a social media certification program and principles for employees who are not official spokes people.
It’s interesting to see that Coca-Cola motivates employees to join the conversation: “We do encourage you to participate in the online social media space, but urge you to do so properly, exercising sound judgment and common sense”.
What’s important is that, when “writing” the social media policy or guidelines, the company involved various departments (that’s really a ‘must’) and that the company tried to keep things simple: in fact, the social media policy only contains 20 guidelines.
Want to draft your own social media policy? Check out what appears to be the official social media policy of Coca-Cola, as the folks at Viralblog.com uploaded it, here (PDF).
More about the Coca-Cola ‘principles’ in this YouTube interview with Adam Brown (posted by Adam Sernowitz), who’s responsible for social media at Coca-Cola and who is of course on Twitter (@adamcb) where he describes himself as “Director, Digital Stuff @ Coca-Cola”.
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