Social Media Policy: A Conversation with Kelly Feller

On Tuesday April 27^th, 2010 Kate Wallace (@k8wallace) led the Twitter conversation on social media policy. The class had a great lecture via Skype from Kelly Feller (@kellyrfeller). Feller is the social media strategist for Intel and she helped to develop the social media policy that Intel employees abide by.

The night before Kelly’s Skype lecture Kate tweeted links to a Slideshare lecture by Dave Fleet (@davefleet) and a Mashable article highlighting social media abuse.

Tuesday morning in class the conversation started off with Feller explaining a little bit about what Intel’s social media policy does and why it’s necessary. As a seasoned marketing expert and social media enthusiast, Feller was quick to point out the necessity of using social media when trying to build relationships with customers. When a company has hundreds of thousands of employees like Intel, there needs to be control and monitorization of all the tweets, comments and posts done by customers and employees. Feller emphasized that Intel’s social media policy was not meant to be a strict set of rules telling employees what not to say, but rather a set of guidelines encouraging employees to stick to their expertise when representing Intel online. Intel’s social media policy is meant to be conversational. It’s easy to understand and is full of constructive ideas on how to better represent Intel.

@k8wallace, @jakesauvageau and @kmatthews promoted the conversation that produced about 115 tweets in a little less than an hour.

There were many important tweets to take away from the lecture: @mlentini “Companies need to use a personal voice in their guidelines and show some level of trust in their employees.”

The most retweeted comment was written by @kmatthews “Necessary for working in SM: a strategic brain and natural curiosity along with being a great writer.”

Other important takeaways from the conversation:

Madeline Willman (@madelinewillman) tweeted a great article reporting only 29% of business have social media policies so far.

-It’s wise for a company to have a written policy to guide employees using social media to represent their business.

-Social media training is becoming a necessary thing for employees to undergo if they’re using social media to interact with customers.

-Controlling the online conversation is hard and timely, but when done right, can be very effective in raising awareness of a product or a business.

-“Focus your time and energy where your audience is,” said @kellyrfeller. If they’re not online, don’t waste your time waiting for them to catch on. Keep traditional forms of marketing in play and don’t disregard an audience just because they’re not using social media.

Tagged conversation, intel, kelly feller, twitter