Telstra announced today the release of its social media policy. Given they’ve been in the Twitter space for a while I was surprised it took them this long to get a policy in place. Whilst it’s good to see a large Australian company formalising how they participate and the obligations upon its staff, aspects of the policy seem somewhat draconian.
Several aspects of the policy (as reported by Smart Company) puzzled me.
Firstly, Telstra employees need to undertake accreditation – or social media training. This seems like a fair request given Telstra probably uses this training to set expectations, reinforce the strategic objectives, ensure the right skills are in place (i.e. can the person spell…)
But after an employee has been accredited:
Employees will also need authorisation from their department head and the company’s public policy staff.
I’m not sure how effective this is going to be in the long run. Does this mean a Telstra employee running an official Twitter account needs to get approval from two layers of management before they can reply to a Tweet? I get the impression that whilst Telstra wants to convey the impression that they are progressive in reality it would seem they don’t trust their staff to be prudent and responsible.This flies in the face of how other large corporations (like IBM, Microsoft, US Air Force) set and manage their social media policies.
I guess this is more evidence of the fallout from the Fake Stephen Conroy saga that Telstra found itself in the middle of.
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Social Media Policy - balancing freedom and corporate responsibility « Smart Selling Blog // April 28, 2009 at 10:32 am |
[...] it’s a reasonable question to be asking. I commented earlier this month about Australian Telco Telstra’s recently announced social media policy which was good but I felt they were closing the gate after the horse had [...]