Tag Archives: twitter

Social Media Policies and Journalists’ Personal Brands

11 Mar

Photo by Dean Meyers on Flickr.

I recently read Reuters’ new guidelines for their journalists’ use of social media.

Here’s a paragraph that stood out for me:

The advent of social media does not change your relationship with the company that employs you — do not use social media to embarrass or disparage Thomson Reuters. Our company’s brands are important; so, too, is your personal brand. Think carefully about how what you do reflects upon you as a professional and upon us as an employer of professionals.

I find it highly interesting that Reuters acknowledges their journalists’ desire to have a personal brand here. I don’t think I’ve seen an explicit reference to that emerging reality in any other media company’s social media policies/guidelines so far. (Correct me if I’m wrong about that, please.)

I recently wrote in an academic paper about the increasingly real dilemma that both journalists and their employers will face in balancing individual brands with corporate brands, particularly with regard to the use of social media to establish both. I think that as today’s young journalists come into the profession – especially those who graduate from journalism programs where personal branding and entrepreneurship are emphasized – it may be challenging to find a happy medium between using social media for self-promotion and for corporate promotion.

Can corporate policies like this one help journalists strike that balance by reminding everyone of the significance of both brands? Or does having a social media policy restrict individuals’ ability to establish their own personal brands, to the degree that they begin to resent their employers?

Overall, Reuters’ policy emphasizes the individual journalist’s role in using social media responsibly, and doesn’t set out many strict rules, suggesting instead a string of things to “think about” when using social media. It’s good to see their trust in their employees’ critical faculties, rather than some of the more draconian approaches to social media that other media organizations have employed, though Reuters does still warn that “your manager and/or senior editors will retrospectively review your professional output” and that “We reserve the right to change your beat or responsibilities if there are problems in this area. In the case of serious breaches, we may use our established disciplinary procedures.”

This question isn’t really a problem just for journalism, of course; other professions will also face the challenge of managing employees’ commitment to “take care of No. 1″ – their own personal brands – as well as their employers’, especially when long-term stable employment seems more and more a thing of the past.

Though social media policies, other than Reuters’ version, don’t yet seem to address this dilemma in quite these terms, it appears likely that this will be a more relevant issue as our workforce becomes increasingly reliant on short-term, freelance and contract projects. After all, if one’s employer isn’t going to take care of you in the long run, then you might be prepared to do it yourself, no matter what you have to tweet.

The Ethics of Retweeting

13 Sep

One of the unexpected ethical challenges that Twitter users inevitably encounter is the retweet. What are the ethics of retweeting?

So far, I’ve seen online discussion address retweets from two main perspectives: 1) how to use retweets to build one’s list of Twitter followers for varying forms of self-promotion; and 2) how to use retweets to enhance search engine optimization (the all-powerful SEO). (If I’ve missed some valuable discussion of the retweet problem somewhere, let me know in the comments.)

As a media and journalism professor, I have a somewhat different perspective. I automatically want to apply some form of journalistic ethical standards to retweeting.

For my own Twitter use, I’ve arrived at two principles: first, correct attribution of information and ideas; and second, accurate representation, or the avoidance of editorializing upon the Tweet of another without clearly designating the speaker.

When I retweet someone else’s words, I do my best to edit them carefully to preserve their original meaning, while also ensuring that the attribution (in the case of Twitter, the RT @originalposter or via @originalposter phrase) fits into the 140-character limit of Twitter. (We can debate the appropriate applications of RT and via. It would be great to have a widely known standard for their usage.*)

...or is it? Attribution matters on Twitter.

...or is it? Attribution matters on Twitter.

For me, this attention to attribution is just as important on Twitter as it is in journalistic writing or scholarly research. After all, let’s admit it: many of us are spending as much time with social media like Twitter as with these other media. We should do each other the ethical courtesy of attributing information.

I have also been frustrated on occasion when someone has retweeted my information and added his or her own personal spin in a way that is indistinguishable from my original Tweet. When my Tweet has been political or otherwise contentious in nature, editorializing upon my Tweet can misrepresent my views.

I accept misrepresentation of my words as a risk of participating in Twitter, but I’d like to see it minimized. Readers of the “spun Tweet” can always contact me directly for clarification, if attribution has been provided as described above, but that’s not too likely to happen. Twitter is a fabulous medium for conversation, but if you can’t tell whose voice is whose, it becomes a garbled mess.

I think it’s important that we carefully distinguish our own thoughts from those of others when we retweet. I’ve seen people do this by using quotation marks, simulated arrows <–, double slashes //, and so on. Again, we don’t have a clear standard in Twitterland for doing this. But whatever method is selected, the key for me is to preserve the original message’s meaning even as I might add my own.

This post isn’t meant to scold anyone who’s retweeted me, or to dissuade others from the use of retweets as a conversational tool, or – ahem – to discourage future retweets of my Tweets. I hope that we do eventually arrive at some consensus about how to maintain the two ethical principles above – attribution and accurate representation – throughout social media like Twitter.

Students and others first venturing into Twitter should be aware that like other media, it has its unique ethical challenges. But the 140-character limit shouldn’t cause us to abbreviate our attention to ethics.

* Personally, I tend to use RT to indicate that a direct quote follows (typically with abbreviations that do not change the intended meaning), and via when I have used someone else’s Tweet to locate a link or info and then added my own interpretation to it. Without a consistent standard, however – a la a Twitter stylebook – it’s hard to know who claims which words in a retweet. To further confound things, Twitter apps use different styles; Tweetie on my iPhone always uses via, whether I like it or not, and unfortunately for the maintenance of my personal standard, I’m often too lazy to edit retweets from my iPhone. (An interesting instance of the medium becoming the message, perhaps.)

Newer Entries →

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 1,133 other followers