How do you craft a set of guidelines around a topic that is loosely defined and ever changing, for use by an audience that has diverse needs and interests? This sums up the task we face with drafting “social media guidelines” for the university.
A group of staff have been meeting on a roughly monthly basis to talk about various topics on social media. Early on, one of the most frequent questions and topics of discussion was “social media guidelines”, and from the outset a couple questions emerged:
- What do we mean by “social media”?
- What do we mean by “guidelines”?
Defining the Questions
The question of what we mean by “social media” is in constant flux. Are we talking about Facebook? Twitter? Flickr? YouTube? Personal blogs? Corporate websites? Mobile apps? Participation in online forums? Sharing presentation or lecture slides online? Increasingly, it seems, the default generic answer is “yes”.
When it comes to guidelines, which of these sound like “guidelines” to you?
- recommendations on which tools and channels to use
- how-to information on how to use different tools
- tips on best practices such as posting frequency, tone
- checklist of “things you should know” before you dive in
- departmental requirements and policies
- official university policy
It was immediately clear that even the term “guidelines” has different meaning to different people depending on the context. There’s no right or wrong in how “guidelines” are interpreted. Every interpretation reflects an existing need, and the diversity of needs reflects the different interests that exist in a large organization such as a university.
Filling the Void
In the absence of an overarching set of “guidelines”, what emerges is a growing number of documents spread throughout the organization in various stages of completeness. In some cases, the documents are in draft mode and being reviewed. In other cases, the documents have been written up as discussion pieces. And in other cases, the document is in active use. But what is also still absent, is the overarching set of guidelines.
Is this so bad? Yes and no.
No, it’s not bad because no matter what, departments must find a way to fill the void and many are doing so with great success. We’re seeing a number of documents being drafted that are providing solid recommendations, referencing relevant policies, as well as providing the “how-to” tips.
But it also isn’t great because for one we’re seeing duplication of effort (and hence resources), but more importantly we’re missing out on a clear opportunity for collaboration and collaboration is vital when it comes to social media. The technologies, properties/destinations, and channels are all part of one larger ecosystem, and the lines that separate us in an organizational chart are meaningless to the audiences we all reach out to.
So what can we do? How can we move this forward?
Factors to Consider
With whatever approach we take, I think there are 4 key considerations to keep in mind (Think there are more? Let me know in the comments.):
- Converging Content: Bottom-Up and Top-Down. The trick here comes down to creating something that meets the needs of the organization as a whole, while allowing for sub-level additions or modifications to meet their unit-level needs. To me it’s not so much a question of do we start at the top or start from the bottom, the point is we need to start wherever we can, and we also need to be prepared to iterate through this (possibly in an on-going fashion) until we converge on some mutually agreeable, relevant, and useful guidelines.
- Agile. We need agility to adapt to the changing landscape of social media – today we have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. But what will we have tomorrow?
- Sustainable. If we need to adapt with the changing landscape and also allow for ongoing adjustments, how do we set ourselves up so that we can maintain this?
- Usable. It’s one thing to create a set of guidelines, and another to produce them in a way that is practical for the people who need to use them. It doesn’t matter what we create if it isn’t easy to use and easy to access.
These are issues of technical capabilities and available resources, as well as governance and decision-making. They present all sorts of questions and challenges, but the lucky thing for us is that we have examples in other areas where similar scenarios are being addressed, namely in the UBC Wiki.
The Case for UBC Wiki
The entire premise of a wiki is based on giving people the ability to contribute content in an open and collaborative way. With the revision history leaving a clear “paper trail” of contributions along with the ability to add discussions tied directly to wiki updates, we can start to connect the dots and see who else has a stake in the creation of these guidelines and reach out to one another if the need arises.
Another big benefit of the feature set offered by the UBC Wiki is the ability to create UBC Wiki Books. This functionality would provide the means for anyone in the UBC community to draft their own set of guidelines or tips, and make these available for others to piece together a wiki book of their own, picking and choosing what’s most relevant to them. Converging content? Check.
What about agile? If we need agility to evolve with the changing tools, one approach is to remain tool-agnostic. But if we have a need to provide how-to tips or recommendations for a specific tool, an online document that anyone can edit at any time would also allow for this flexibility to make changes. Agile? Check.
The UBC Wiki is hosted on central servers and is supported by staff. Through CWL, any UBC staff, faculty or student can access the wiki and make changes as needed, truly enabling a rolling cast of participants who can contribute to the ongoing life of the information. Sustainable? Check.
Now how about usability? Some of the criticisms of wikis have been that adding content requires some geek-level knowledge to do, that the bland and generic presentation of information with long scrolling pages is visually unappealing and unusable. In this case it might be a matter of personal preferences and what we are accustomed to, but these criticisms exist and they do signal that for some people wikis can be intimidating to use. Usable? Maybe for some, but for others (including the many folks who might get the most use out of social media guidelines) maybe not.
Usability affects the adoption rate of a tool like a wiki, and if there is a barrier to using the tool, this eventually becomes a barrier to the tool’s utility.
To address these types of challenges, the fine folks in CTLT have been working hard to “garden” the wiki to clean up the content and improve the overall information organization. CTLT has also been working hard on ways to keep the wiki focused on its core purpose of being an open content repository, and then building on top of this foundation by adding functionality (like the Wiki Embed Plugin for WordPress) that allows others to pull content from the wiki and re-package it into more user-friendly formats. The combination of this content cultivation and lightweight tools to embed wiki-based content are paving the way toward creating a more usable experience. So back to: usable? We are definitely getting there.
Getting Started
It’s with all of this thinking in mind that I’m starting up a draft of what I’m dubbing a “UBC Social Media Handbook” – starting out by creating some pages within the UBC Wiki. I’ve been working on some tests of this in the Sandbox, also been reviewing and writing content, as well as reviewing work that has already been done by others both here at UBC and at other institutions.
If things work out in these initial attempts in the Sandbox, we can reach out and see how to move this along and increase overall participation.
I’ll be sure to post some updates, and in the meantime if you have any thoughts or feedback, I’d be happy to hear more.
Update: March 2011
Here’s a slidedeck I prepared for one of our Social Media Meetups where the topic of guidelines came up again. It’s nothing new, just a different way of explaining the concept for this proposed bottom-up + top-down approach to crafting social media guidelines: