Like it or not, your company needs a social media policy

They may be stupid, but guidelines help employees navigate the online world

Back in mid-January, Thomas Nelson Publishers CEO Michael Hyatt wrote a blog post titled “Five Reasons Why Your Company Doesn’t Need a Social Media Policy.”

I didn’t disagree with a single one of Hyatt’s points, but I walked away from the article still convinced that companies need social media policies (or, at least, guidelines). Recently, HubSpot’s Michael Volpe wrote a similar post—”Why a Social Media Policy is Stupid“—that focuses on just one of the points Hyatt made. Volpe wrote

No single channel of interaction is more important than others. Social media is not something weird or different, it is just one of many ways your company interacts with people. Giving social media its own policy implies that phone, email and in-person interactions are not important or less important.

Hyatt came at the argument from a slightly different perspective: