The time to implement a social media policy is now.

Your social media policy outlines for employees your companies guidelines or principles for communicating in the online world.  Your company should have a communications policy in place that spell out your expectations for phone and email, it’s important that you add social media and online site usage to this policy.

Here is an excerpt from our employee manual in regards to Electronic Privacy. Feel free to use the information when revising or creating your social media policy.   You may also want to consider adding in repercussions for not following the policy:

We grew a lot in 2009.  This is a great thing but it has also exposed a lot about our company that we want to improve on. It's pretty obvious what we need to work on to support the growth we expect in 2010 and beyond.

DTi has had the pleasure of working with David Mann for over 10 years. David owns Alta Log Homes in Upstate NY. Alta is a leading manufacturer of Log Homes. David is an expert in building Green, Energy Star dream homes and a great guy.

His website is http://www.altaloghomes.com.

We set him up with the Ultimate Social Media Rig a few months ago along with some coaching services to get him started. He's been pretty religious about posting and using it.

He sent me an email asking what recommendations I'd have to get more out of it now that he's "warmed up" and has a little more experience with Social Media.

Recently, I was asked to speak at a breakout session called "Jumpstart Social Media for your IT Business" at the ConnectWise PSA 2009 Partner Summit. What a great event, we learned so much for our MSP practice, we are still implementing!

Some of the power point slides from the breakout show our Project Plan for rolling out our "Ultimate Social Media Rig". We promised to get the project plan posted on the site. Rather than post just screen shots, we made it easier for you to get started and typed it up too, copy/paste ftw.

It's more likely than you think.  This month, video advertisements will be showing up for the first time ever in traditional paper magazines.

In a world where we are always connected, always wired into the system, it's incredible to think how much information about us is being broadcasted into the void.  Everyone's doing it; Taco Bell wants you to call them toll free to chat about your experience, Facebook wants your full name, as opposed to a fake screen name, Microsoft wants to gather information about your computer every time something crashes.  Is our privacy really being invaded?  We'll talk about privacy, and the popular Palm Pre phone that seems to be taking Data Collection too far.