A few weeks ago I took a look at useful and proven techniques for the the early adoption phase of social business, which is often the trickiest and most fraught with challenges. But there’s another important aspect of social media that’s often neglected, overly legalized, and treated as a static formality through which to guide social media use in safe and constructive directions (again primarily to deal with risk and associated worries.) I’m talking about the often-discussed but all-to-frequently under appreciated social media policy.

Social media policy is usually not perceived as an exciting topic, yet at this stage of the industry nothing could be further from the truth. It should now be considered a primary enabler as enterprises develop — or update — their social business strategies. Because of this perception, one of the more powerful and transformative tools in the social business arsenal will be left to languish unmodernized by many, making the organization do too much work, assume too much downside, and ignore important upsides.

The good news is that from my experience, most social media policies have evolved into largely common sense listings of how to protect yourself, your co-workers, the company, and your customers from potential missteps in a very public forum. In that most workers can now read and generally understand their company’s social media policy (at least once, hopefully) it serves its purpose. But an infrequently revised and non-operational social media policy means that 1) most of the potential value that it could provide fails to be seized and 2) it misses a major opportunity to become a place to communicate, realize strategic vision, and enable on-the-ground change across the company in a surprisingly concrete way.

The essential point here is that the manner in which companies go about connecting their employees to the channels of social media does very much matter in the end. Creating an environment that makes it easy for workers to succeed is one of the most important first steps. In this, a more up-to-date and modern conception of social media policy and associated governance is needed. It must be adaptive, dynamic, and living. It must also have a closed feedback loop with the rapidly changing and evolving environment it purports to govern.

The industry has recently begun seeing the necessary trappings from enterprise social software vendors to enable a new vision for social media enablement, one driven by policy, yet leaves participants free to act as they need, knowing they’ll be quite safe in the boundaries that have been prescribed. When it comes to the strategies that drive social business performance, we find that social media works best when its users are set free to create the collaborative patterns, structures, and processes they need to work together, inside, outside, or between companies. When they have a safety net that ensures they can act with confidence, the results will correspondingly improve. And when corporate governance teams and senior leaders realize that a safety net is operational around the clock and around the globe and that it accurately represents their concerns, they have their own level of confidence to begin driving forward social business objectives, knowing that in these fairly uncertain times, their imagined downsides are at bay.

What does a modern social business policy look like, one that enables this scenario? It should contain the following three ongoing processes:

Define

The modern social media policy should be contained in a blog post, wiki page, or some other social artifact so it can be revised quickly and easily, as well as commented on and discussed. It should be updated no less than once a month and preferably after every significant lesson learned.

It should contain the code of conduct, key laws and regulations that must be followed for that industry and company, as well as relevant IT policy and associated issues. It should also contain good examples of best practices that helps spark workflow improvements and local innovations to business processes. This latter piece is a major opportunity missed in my opinion and requires little additional effort. The policy should also represent the latest best practices being captured within the organization, giving examples of key elements of the policy. In fact, tying useful techniques to policy ensure that the additional context makes it more relevant as well as making it much more useful and interesting to most line workers, increasingly absorption.

Communicate

The social media policy should be communicated via training, clearly articulated goals and incentives (real-life examples of which I’ll explore as soon as possible), and executive outreach including leading through example. Communication of the policy should be conducted during new employee on boarding, for contractors, and for existing employees, ideally using lightweight education technologies that makes it simple to review. In fact, since the policy will change often, the lightest weight forms of content should be used since it will be updated frequently.

Verify

When it comes to social media, the best way to reduce concerns about risk and liability while simultaneously ensuring safety and widespread participation is to trust, but verify. The latest social media compliance tools can be used to literally embody the social media policy as a real, participatory actor in the system, creating secure narrative logs for regulators and internal audit, while monitoring conversations, detecting policy violations quickly, and interceding automatically if necessary. This is where exciting new fields of social analytics and business intelligence come into play as a key element of monitoring, detection, and reporting. I’ll be exploring the latest of these capabilities soon to see what their strengths and weaknesses are, but it’s currently ushering in a major new way to connect policy, corporate governance, while lifting the shackles from social media so it can get real work done while practically dealing with the realities of a highly dynamic and freeform new medium.

Thus, taking all three of these processes into account, the best way to connect employees to social media is to create an environment where their actions are not only going to be checked with business guidelines at a distance, but literally made safe yet productive at all times. While this is a newer conception of policy, as a living, breathing agent in the ecosystem, it’s one that is now within reach for most firms to ensure the openness and transparency of social media give us the results we’re looking for, day in and day out.

Social business is rapidly evolving and the possibilities of enabling social media in a policy driven way that lowers concerns while tapping into what makes it special is key. I’d love to hear your stories about how your organization is dealing with policy.

On Saturday afternoon I got a text message from one of my colleagues. Apparently, policy kept coming up in other panel discussions – panels that, on the surface, had nothing to do with policy. And then I remembered why Kate and I decided to submit a panel on policy in the first place: policy may not be the cornerstone of social business, but it’s definitely part of the foundation.

At the core of all of this social “stuff” is a cultural shift. Companies that are serious about becoming social businesses are currently somewhere in the transition from closed to open. It’s a serious shift, and the importance of policy in that shift is seriously downplayed. It shouldn’t be. The way you structure your policy and the way that policy is socialized internally will have an impact, however big or small, on the way your employees view the shift from traditional business to social business.

To be clear, I’m not saying that social media policy should dictate your corporate culture. What I am saying is that your policy should reflect your corporate culture. In other words, your unique corporate culture should be inherent in your policy; it should be evident in every word. As your culture shifts from more closed to more open, your policy should change, too. Be open to change; if you’re serious about social business, it’s inevitable.

You’re not still using a social media policy that you found on the internet and ran a find-and-replace using your company name, are you?

From our work over the past two years, I can tell you that there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to social media policy. Based on our client advisory work, Ellen Reynolds and Kate Rush Sheehy are proposing a panel for South by Southwest 2011, called How Social Policies Affect Company Culture. If selected, Ellen and Kate will share their experiences with you that they’ve gained across multiple client engagements while assisting with policy creation and launch.

They will cover:

• The importance of having a defined social media policy.
• The non-negotiable points that all social media policies must cover.
• How to successfully create, approve and enforce your social media policy.
• The importance of accurately reflecting your unique company culture in your policy, and how to use your policy to encourage the right level of internal and external participation.

They’ll answer these questions from a client-side perspective:

1. What information must my social media policy cover?
2. Who should be involved in the creation and approval process?
3. How can I make sure my social policy is a good fit for my company/company culture?
4. How do I make sure that my policy is encouraging participation rather than hindering it?
5. How often do I need to revisit my policy?

If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give a thumbs up to How Social Policies Affect Company Culture.

Over the past two years I’ve analyzed every policy I could get my hands on to identify important buckets of necessary information. Those with corporate policies know that there are non-negotiable points every policy must communicate. For example, you must remind employees to respect each other, keep proprietary facts confidential, and handle mistakes transparently.

An often-overlooked point is the importance of accurately capturing and reflecting your company’s unique culture in the policy’s language. There are a few good examples of social media policies that many have borrowed from (IBM, Intel, and Oracle, to name a few). There is nothing inherently wrong with using one, or a combination of those policies, as a solid starting point. However, what I seefrequently is a lot of “copy-paste” action. Herein lies the issue: If you take a close look at these companies’ policies, you get a good glimpse of their corporate culture in the wording. Not yours.

In the same way that not every company is the same, not every company is in the same place when it comes to embracing social tools. Your company may be more or less open, more or less transparent, or more or less ready than the companies whose policies you are using to craft your own. There are also important implications to consider based on your industry and your client base.

If you currently have social media policies and guidelines in place, I would recommend pulling them out and carefully evaluating where the policy stands in comparison to where your company stands.  Does the policy accurately reflect where you are, as a company, today? Are you a “can” or a “can’t” organization?

Don’t get me wrong. You should definitely plan for where you want to be, but you should also be realistic about where you are. Baby steps. Don’t try to go from zero engagement to social business in one move. As your corporate culture becomes more socially minded, your policy can adapt to allow for increased engagement.

The beautiful thing about social is that it is ever changing, as your policy should be. Your policy today should not be the same as your policy in a year, or two years from now. As your organization gets up to speed, revisit your policy often to make sure it continues to promote the right amount and kind of participation.