Open-sourcing Our Social Media Policy

Our leadership team has seen many examples of how to approach policymaking—ranging from our partners at Netflix who believe “No Rules Rules,” to the Army and its detailed policies on sleeve length—so we’ve thought a lot about where we fit and how we develop official policies as we grow. Recently, we tackled developing a Social Media Policy.

As a young and nimble organization, we trend towards Netflix’s approach: we’d rather arm our employees with context and judgment than attempt to construct an exhaustive document that offers guidelines for every possible scenario.

The advantages of this approach became apparent as we researched other companies’ social media policies. It’s impossible to capture the nuance or the breadth of what might happen on the World Wide Web—nobody could’ve predicted that we'd all be laughing over a cat filter hijacking a courtroom hearing. Moreover, the policies that tried to capture and regulate this nuance were so long that even I—someone sincerely interested in them—started to have thoughts like “I really should see if any important emails got lost in my spam folder. . .”

My co-founder Roxanne and I sat down to discuss what was most important to us when it came to social media and jotted down four bullet points as we talked:

• Represent yourself and not the company

• Be considerate of colleagues: social media is never the best way to offer feedback

• Be considerate of customers: think carefully before mentioning a customer

• Confidential info should never be shared and hate speech is never tolerated

Our list wasn’t exhaustive, and it didn’t touch on many edge cases (or, if we’re honest, many cases), but we felt confident that our team would understand and remember these core tenets of how to behave online. So, these four bullet points became our official Social Media “Policy”—please use it if it speaks to you!

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If you’re interested in helping us define our culture, check out our jobs page. We’re hiring!