How A Social Media Policy Can Protect Your Firms Brand

With over 4 billion people using various platforms and 13 new users signing up every second, social media has become a daily habit in our lives. For businesses, social media is an invaluable tool to connect and communicate with existing and potential customers. This can help to humanise your brand. Conversely, social media can also lead to bad press and damage your brands reputation; this can happen without you even posting anything onto your business’ social media channels.

Employees with personal social media accounts still represent their employers and act as ambassadors. An ill-timed or offensive joke can result in damage to the brands image despite a post never appearing under your company name. A perfect example of this is Justine Sacco.

In 2013, Justine Sacco, then a PR director for IAC, was boarding an 11-hour flight from London to Cape Town. With only 200 followers, Justine would occasionally tweet out what she considered to be a joke, including:

 ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!’.

Being on a plane with no internet, Justine Sacco was completely oblivious to the fact that she was now the number 1 Twitter trend worldwide. This forced IAC to issue a statement to protect its brand image:

 ‘This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC. Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight, but this is a very serious matter, and we are taking appropriate action.’

IAC would later give another statement publicly acknowledging they had fired Justine Sacco. Even though these comments did not happen on an official IAC social channel, IAC had to act to preserve its public image. With 88% of people valuing brand trust, this PR crisis could have very easily resulted in direct loss of income.

Incidents like this can be avoided by making employees aware they are acting as ambassadors on their personal social media profiles. A good way to do this is by issuing a social media policy that all employees must sign and return.

A social media policy will lay down rules for how employees are expected to act on both a business’ official social media channels, as well as their personal accounts. With a social media policy, you can:

• Protect your firm from legal risk should disciplinary action be required
• Encourage employees to follow and engage with your official channels, increasing brand recognition and reputation
• Educate your employees on the best practices for using social media, both professionally and personally
• Lay out rules for engaging with other users on social media platforms
• Outline the unacceptable usage of social media
• Define the process they should follow if they are unsure about what is appropriate
• Outline the consequences of misusing social media

A good rule of thumb for posting online, is if you wouldn’t stand in the middle of the street and shout it, don’t share it on social media.

If you would like advice on implementing a social media policy or any other HR-related issue, please contact the team at IHRS by visiting Get in touch | Insurance HR Solutions.