Social Media Policy and Non-Profit Organization: Exploring the Legal Ramifications of 'Being Social'

In recent years individuals, businesses and non-profit organizations have embraced the use of social media, online tools that support the quick and easy creation and sharing of content by users including blogs, social network sites [1]. Increasingly, organizations are noting the imperative to be where their target market is, and are creating a social media presence. This paper contrasts three non-profit organizations’ social media policies and guidelines. It identifies critical legal and ethical points for organizations to consider when devising a social media policy. While various guidelines on writing social media policies exist, the cases examined here underlined the variations in organizational approach, which may in some cases expose the employer to liability and potential litigation. In addition, non-profits have context specific considerations such as neutrality and crisis care that should be noted explicitly in their guidelines and policy for the benefit of all stakeholders. As more and more social media and employment cases are heard by tribunals and courts, it is important for all organizations to stay up to date with social media technology and the law, to ensure that their interests are protected. Klang and Nolin provide a useful model for classifying social media policies and guidelines based on their foundation position [2]. Policies or guidelines that specify and offer different guidelines or clauses based on a specific social media platform basis (e.g. clauses tailored to Facebook and Twitter) are considered heterogeneous. Those that are generic, providing one policy or guideline to suit all platforms are homogenous. Additionally, policies or guidelines can be written so as to indicate social media is a problem to be managed or a possibility to be explored [2]. These differences are presented in a quadrant model classifying social media policy as having a Bureaucratic foundation (Homogenous-Problem), a Branding foundation (Homogenous Possibility), a Disciplining foundation (Heterogeneous-Problem) or a Participatory foundation (HeterogeneousPossibility) [2]. This model will be used to classify the cases introduced in the paper.