PR Policymaker

Finally, my book, “Social Media and Public Relations: Eight New Practices for the PR Professional” is done!  I just reviewed the cover and the manuscript is in its final form.  It was a fairly smooth process with only one slight hiccup.  After writing almost 300 pages, my publisher told me that I had to cut back to about 175.  That’s a lot of pages to cut!  As I removed chunks of copy, I also had to remove many of the graphics developed for the book, including eight charts, with each one relating to the roles the different practices.

For the next several PR 2.0 Strategies posts, I’ll be sharing these charts and discussing briefly the related roles and responsibilities.  The first chart cut was from Practice #1: The PR Policymaker.  You can see from the wheel diagram there are several new roles and responsibilities for you to learn and embrace, as you evolve into the PR Policymaker.

© PR 2.0 Strategies

The PR Policymaker is a professional who quickly learns that a crucial part of the communications strategy and planning process includes the development of social media policies, training, and governance. Not only developing social media policies, but also maintaining them falls within this new PR practice.

Here are a few of your new responsibilities:

Spearhead a Social Media Core Team: You and other social media champions in your organization will form a team responsible for vision and strategy.  This is also the team that creates the social media policy and guides the process.

Conduct a Social Media Audit: A social media audit allows you to identify any of the challenges or problem areas within your brand’s current social communications program. By evaluating your social properties, you’re also able to pinpoint genuine opportunities and what has been working with respect to participation and engagement in the social media landscape.  A few areas the audit focuses on include brand guidelines, types of content shared, frequency of content, levels of engagement, measurement, etc.

Establish Policy Objectives:  As a member of the communications department, you will have several of your own objectives for creating a social media policy, but so will other groups within the organization that want to accomplish specific goals. These groups may include HR, Legal, Marketing, IT, etc.  If you’re a PR policymaker, then you will help to build a policy to accomplish a variety of objectives fulfilling department objectives across the organization.

Guide the Policy Process:  Your natural liaison skills make it easy to help guide the policy process.  As a PR policymaker you may be coordinating team meetings across departments, assigning tasks to appropriate department champions and using your project management skills to get the policy written, reviewed and shared with your organization in a timely manner.

Create a Plan to Communicate the Policy: Writing the policy is only step one.  Step two includes delivering and supporting the policy the right way.  The PR policymaker has to develop a communications plan to introduce and inspire employees to embrace the policies.  A couple of examples include communication through interactive formats rather than long Word documents and considering a reward program for social media participation, as a part of employee recognition.

Measure Policy Compliance:  Another important part of the PR Policymaker process is measuring the behavior and usage of the policy. You can ask for feedback through employee questionnaires, informal interviews, polls, and by monitoring and evaluating employee internal participation and collaboration.  You will need your employee evangelists to be willing participants, and to also be that unified voice or army of champions who support and add value to the brand’s social presence.

Maintain the Policy: As a strategic communicator, the practice of the PR Policymaker does not stop with the first round of development.  In many organizations marketing and PR are responsible for maintaining and updating the policy every six months to a year and then working with different departments on implementation.  A good social media policy reflects where and how the organization communicates and the constant social media growth in different communities.

Are you currently involved in any of these roles and how are you managing your new responsibilities?