If the company you work for is fairly large it's important to have a web communication policy.
The policy is important because it helps to define who can talk on behalf of the company.
You don't want to get into a situation where an employee appears to be speaking on behalf of the company in a social media platform.
This could cause legal problems for both the company and employee.
When an employee works for the company and chooses to talk about the company's product or service it needs to be clear in what capacity they are participating in the conversation.
If they have authority to talk on behalf of the company it needs to be clear they represent the company.
If the authority is not authorized the employee needs to make sure they say it's their own personal opinion and not the thoughts of the company.
In either capacity the employee needs to know what they are allowed to discuss online.
Within your policy make it clear who can put out documents on behalf of the company.
Everyone thinks they are good writers but truly there are individuals who shouldn't be writing documents that will be given to the general public.
If an issue arises there should be a section within the web communication policy that outlines who within the company should be contacted.
This will help to make sure the right individuals are informed about the specifics of the situation and determine if a plan of action is needed.
Any type of communication to the public is a reflection of the brand.
All individuals who will be interacting with an external audience need to be trained in the basics of communication.
You don't want the worst writer within the company writing announcements or press releases.
It only takes one bad communication to taint the image that took years to build.
Don't wait until an issue pops up to create a policy.
The policy shouldn't be complicated to understand when it is being read.
The most important thing is to make sure the policy is easy to find within your company.
Once a document is out on the web and a search engine indexes it there's a big problem.
So if you have an employee giving false information on a blog the search engine will have it stored in its internal database.
The information will show if it is matched by the right search criteria.
Yes, the post can be deleted but most likely the damage has already been done due to web users who saw the post already.
The same goes for documents; once the search engine indexes the document the only thing to do is delete the document and hope no one made a copy or saved it to their computer.