Others are sitting on the sidelines waiting for a RegFD violation from those who are using it or direction from the SEC on specific guidelines for its use (I wouldn’t hold my breath).   

Whatever the reason – people are using social networks to talk about your company and you need to get involved in the conversation now.  However, there are many considerations such as specific social networks to use and for what purpose i.e. IR, PR, Marketing or Advertising. 

No matter what department and the social network used, there are an increasing number of articles written by social media experts who recommend that organizations stepping into the social media arena  should have a social media policy in place. 

For example, in a recent post on her blog, hrbartender.com, Sharlyn Lauby, President of Internal Talent Management asks the question “Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?” in which she outlines the Five W’s to adopting a social media policy.

Another example for putting a social media policy in place and some great ideas of what to include is by Dave Fleet, a communications professional based in Toronto with a passion for social media.  In a recent three-part series posted on his website he states that companies should consider having both an internal and external policy when getting started with social media.

A final example is from David Cesarini, a financial services marketing consultant who specializes in social media marketing and organizes social media marketing workshops. He provides an excerpt of a social media policy for a financial services company in his blog “Sample Social Media Guidelines for Financial Services.”

After reading these articles, I thought it would be useful to speak with a company who has a social media policy in place.  As a result, I got in contact with Ruth Cotter, Director IR and Treasury at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).  It was from her participation in a session entitled “The Evolution of Financial Communication” at the NIRI conference in June of this year that I learned that AMD had one.  

What follows is the background on how AMD’s social media policy evolved and some interesting ideas to ensure the guidelines are clear and easily adopted by everyone.

BACKGROUND

AMD’s use of social media began with a blog for product initiatives.  The marketing team wanted a forum to discuss their products in more detail and there were internal discussions with other departments such as legal, IR and PR to find a suitable venue to do this – as such it was decided that a blog would be an acceptable place to start and best managed from a corporate risk perspective.

AMD started using the blog before implementing their company-wide policy.  Interestingly enough, it was their legal counsel who wanted to see where it was going to evolve first.  They say it made it easier to put together a list of guidelines dubbed the “Streetlight System” (which I will outline shortly). 

The policy was tailored specifically to AMD’s needs; keeping all departments in consideration.  In addition, as they have been using the blog for a few years now, they field a lot of questions from other companies and have an understanding of what other organizations are using it for so they have incorporated those insights into the policy as well.

Once the policy was finalized, they formed a social media counsel consisting of legal, IR, PR, Marketing and the Product Business Unit.  The policy is reviewed on a quarterly basis as part of a separate disclosure process to ensure the “envelope” is not being pushed too much.  It also continually evolves as the company adapts and updates their internal “best practices” for its use. 

BLOGGING LICENSES

As employees began reading the blog, all groups wanted to have a chance to address their “key” audiences (there seemed to be an internal realization that using social media helped to find out who their audiences were and how to address these audiences effectively). 

As the blog had been going for a few years now, the social media counsel wanted to ensure that the new “interested” groups were going to maintain a consistent presence.  As there were differing opinions on who should be able to participate, the social media counsel decided to issue “Blogging Licenses”.  All employees who want to blog on behalf of the company have to get proper training on best practices.  Ultimately the license is granted by AMD’s Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).  In order to assess whether to grant a blogging license, the CMO needs to know:

• The area in which the blogger will blog (work, home, play, developer);
• The topics on which the person will blog;
• How the blog will further the strategic goals of AMD; and
• How the blog is unique.

The license actually came about from an existing employee development program entitled “License to Lead” – in which employees are invited to attend training sessions to move up in the company (unconscious responsibilities are derived from the word “lead” which they felt would resonate with everyone).

The blogging licenses help to keep the number of bloggers under control as well as monitoring the messages to ensure a united voice. AMD has approximately 14 licenses in total today, with the most active voices coming from the product and marketing departments and the server and server/software divisions.  

As a result of the increased use of bloggers, the social media policy has branched out to include personal use of Facebook and Twitter (which I will discuss later).  To ensure awareness and the importance of the social media policy, it is posted on the homepage of the company’s intranet and highlighted in employee newsletters.

AMD SOCIAL MEDIA STREETLIGHT SYSTEM

All blogs must comply with the General Guidelines and the AMD Streetlight System – which was put in place to help employees better understand the areas of risk and when to enlist the help of the legal and IR departments.

As mentioned the social media counsel meets regularly to discuss areas in which the company may engage in social media.  These areas are assigned a “streetlight” colour (i.e., green, yellow or red) based on the perceived risk to AMD.

The meaning of the streetlight colours are as follows:

• Green light – PR and legal review is NOT required
     o Example: Previously approved statements of fact related to publicly available AMD products
• Yellow light – PR and legal review not required if the writer sticks to approved AMD talking point guidelines.  Otherwise, legal and IR review is required with respect to strategy or actual content
     o Example: Positioning of AMD products
• Red light – No social media engagement allowed
     o Example: Financial guidance

ADDITIONAL AREAS ADDRESSED

Social Networking Tools (Facebook/Flickr/YouTube)

The company recognizes that more than likely employees will have some kind of social media account which they use for private and personal networking. Some employees may use these accounts to promote AMD’s products and technologies. If that is the case, some additional rules apply:

• Be careful not to post pictures, videos or articles or “test messages” which might embarrass you, fellow colleagues or the company.
• Posts made to social networking sites must adhere to the General Guidelines and the AMD Social Media Streetlight System.

Twitter and Company Intranet

The policy also covers off micro-blogging sites such as Twitter.  It also includes the company’s intranet which allows employees who work in different locations to talk amongst one another (e.g. design groups use it to talk globally) and in general helps manage efforts to keep conversations that should stay internal, internal. 

Whether you are just starting out using social media or have been using it for quite some time, if you haven’t already, you should seriously think about putting together a social media policy.  Now bear in mind, a social media policy is not meant to be cookie cutter so just like implementing social media tools into your current communications program, it should be specifically tailored to your organization.  A good starting point may be to review employee, communications and disclosure policies that already exist within your organization and of course enlist the help of your legal counsel.   

As  a point of interest, here are a few links to other companies who have social media policies:

IBM’s social media guidelines

BBC’s editorial guidelines

I also came across this presentation on SlideShare that conveys the merits of having a social media policy.

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Sheryl Joyce, joined us on April 14, as Director of Marketing Communications and is responsible for all marketing and communications initiatives such as blogging, webinars, events and best practices. Sheryl has twelve years experience in the capital markets industry, nine of those specializing in investor relations.  Sheryl brings years of experience in investor relations and corporate communications and maintains well-established relationships with sell-side analysts, institutional investors, investment bankers and transfer agents.

Sheryl has hit the ground running with a number of blog posts (see below) and managed our popular webinar on IR website best practices.  Sheryl is also behind our new corporate twitter profile @q4websystems and is active in LinkedIn and our Q4 fan page on Facebook.  Be sure to say hi next time you see her online!

Here are some of Sheryl’s recent posts:

• IR Website Best Practices Webinar Wrap-Up
• An IR perspective “Equity Research in the Age of the Web”
• Successful Integration of Social Media Tools in IR Websites

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I think what I enjoy most about the process for implementing the Rockefeller Habits is that it’s actually very similar to using Agile processes for developing software:

1. Focus on the highest value items first
2. Make progress on those items
3. Have a retrospective
4. Find new (and usually more difficult) problems
5. Repeat 1 – 4 often

For us, seeing a problem as an opportunity for improvement is the key. At the end of each quarter we get together and brainstorm what problems popped up during the quarter and then we widdle them down to which ones we can address the next quarter.

This exercise is usually the most emotionally draining but the mood improves very quickly when those problems are turned into solutions. This is the 4th consecutive quarter we’ve gone through this exercise and it was interesting to see how the complexity of the priorities increased as the quarters went by.

The very nature of Scrum is to constantly improve by having retrospectives at the end of each sprint.  The Team talks about what went well, what didn’t go well and what they want to try during the next sprint. We’ve proven it’s been effective in our development teams so we decided our #1 priority this quarter is to extend the use of Scrum principles to the rest of the departments within the company.

After living with the Rockefeller Habits for a year, I can say without a doubt that the process works.  Everyone rallies around the priorities and collaborates on solutions that help remove waste and increase efficiency across all departments.  I would be interested to hear your thoughts about how you’ve used similar processes in your company or if you have questions about some tactics we use to keep this process running smoothly.

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Anyone who has worked for company experiencing explosive growth can appreciate the difficulties that come with it and the the importance of maintaining focus with respect to corporate objectives.  Chris Jones posted back in July with respect to our adoption of the Rockefeller Habits as well as our re-adoption of Scrum as a way to maintain alignment across the company.

Since Q2 2008, we have been living our values. The single most important value we realize at Q4 is a dedication to constant improvement. 
Lately I’ve been blogging a great deal about Reg FD and social media so I thought I’d switch gears to ring in the new year and post about our corporate culture.

I remember our first initial sessions trying to implement the Rockefeller Habits and there were many long nights, weekends and, ahem, ’spirited discussions’, however, we progressed and improved upon those sessions each quarter.

Our re-adoption of Scrum actually helped the corporate alignment process as we now have company-wide retrospectives to learn about is and isn’t working.  In each retrospective we end up with a set of tangible improvements to make in the next quarter and during subsequent retrospectives we ’scrub’ which of these we were able to implement.  These improvements don’t need to be earth shattering, as  a series of small improvements add up over time.

‘Agile’ seems to be the latest buzzword in software development and many companies are adopting Agile principles to how they develop software – meaning they are leveraging the 4 main values from the Agile Manifesto:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
4. Responding to change over following a plan

I won’t go into great detail about these statements, but in general terms they mean that we agree there is value in the items on the right, but we value the items on the left more.  A simple example would be ‘would you rather have a piece of software you can provide real feedback on quickly, or a 200 page spec document that is outdated the second it’s finished and then stuffed in a filing cabinet only to never be looked at again?’

We’ve extended Agile principles to other aspects of our business and each business unit starts the day with their own daily stand-up -  essentially a 15 minute meeting status update – and all department heads meet up once a week for a “Scrum of Scrums” to ensure we are setting weekly goals to track toward our quarterly priority.

Working in short iterations from a business perspective and the frequent quick and time boxed meetings does wonders for productivity.   Our goals and priorities are clear and enforced by creating weekly priorities based on the bigger quarterly and yearly goals.

The key message in how we operate is that we work as a team, we adapt to change quickly and we learn frequently through retrospectives.  This commitment to constant improvement is a recipe for success and I’m looking forward to another great year at Q4.

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The article talks about the 3 states a person generally lives in at any given time; past, future and present.  I’m sure just about everyone uses their cell phone while driving, or has the news on TV while eating dinner and while checking email on their blackberry.  All of this multi-tasking leads to a drop in focus, drop in productivity as well as an increase in stress.

What I admire about my friends here at Q4 is that we have always taken the approach of living “in the now”.  There is always temptation to immediately react to any problem and I have personally been guilty of leaping before looking, but here are a few ways we handle “living in the now”

1. On our white board in our work area we have a motto for all to see.  Stop.  Think.  React.
2. In our group chat when anyone feels we are going down a rabbit hole, someone posts  “Stop.  Think.  React”
3. We reiterate this message in meetings

I have personally found this approach very useful, even in my personal life, but the greatest benefit is the gain in productivity and enjoyment at work since we are all on-board with ‘looking before leaping’

Something so simple makes a big difference in both our productivity and how we interact with each other at work.  Stop.  Think.  React.

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