What’s New in Social Media Planning & Policy Development?

My last blog post, creating a social media policy, focused on a how to develop your policy to best suit your organization’s needs. Social media policies are created to guide employee participation, company outreach and offer best practices for how the public interacts with the organization on blogs and in social networks.  As I’m preparing for a PRSA Webinar on building a social media policy this Wednesday, July 20^th, I’ve come across some great statistics that I want to share with you that reveal how organizations are moving in the right direction with respect to their social media planning, policies and guidelines.  Of course, in time, I hope to see the stats increase to reveal that a higher percentage of communications professionals are spearheading social media policy development, distribution and maintenance of best practices, with respect to a company’s social guidelines.

Here are a few of the statistics that stood out:

eMarketer published a study by Digital Brand Expressions (May 2010) where:

• Approximately 71% of US companies use the marketing department as the area responsible for the creation and maintenance of the social media communications plan.
• Approximately 21% of US companies use their corporate communications department as the area responsible for the creation and maintenance of the social media communications plan.
• Approximately 78% of US companies are using social media sites, however, about 52% are working without a game plan.
• According to US companies, approximately 45% prepare and distribute protocols and policies for ongoing communications, in their social media plans (including how to respond to negative comments).
• According to US companies, approximately 39% distribute guidelines for all employees regarding their general use of social media, for both professional and personal use.
• According to US companies, approximately 29% prepare and distribute social media policies/guidelines for the use of social media by different departments within the organization.

One of the most important messages conveyed from these numbers is that social media planning includes policy development and distributing guidelines to an organization’s employees (in some cases by department). Did you develop your social media policy as a part of your communications planning in 2010? If so, is your marketing or communications department spearheading the development?