Can corporate policies keep people off Twitter and Facebook?

According to legend, news happens in threes, and in the past two days the news has given us three major employers - ESPN, the NFL, and the Marines - who have all put new social media policies in place. Each one has approached it differently and given us a wealth of object lessons in one week.

• ESPN released some "additional guidelines" for participating in social networking. They seem to have tripped over their shoes, though: when it happened, one of their workers immediately tweeted that they were now only allowed to tweet for ESPN directly. ESPN has spent the past day trying to clarify and says that their new guidelines are not intended to shut down social media use.
  
  It seems that ESPN's problems stem from their guidelines being pretty vague: how exactly do you interpret the guideline "The first and only priority is to serve ESPN sanctioned efforts?" Is it really feasible to require that "Prior to engaging in any form of social networking dealing with sports, you must receive permission?" Other guidelines, like "Assume at all times you are representing ESPN" and "If you wouldn’t say it on the air or write it in your column, don’t tweet it" make much more sense.

• The NFL seems to be setting up policies that are more restrictive, but also more closely defined and, consequently, less open to misinterpretation. They seem to be putting restrictions on when their employees can tweet: they cannot tweet from meetings. (One glaring issue: this policy seems to only be apply to Twitter - how about a Facebook post? Oops.) The NFL already bans any kind of cell phones or computers on the sidelines, and the word is that Twitter restrictions may apply to game days in their entirety. It has the benefit of being clear, although it's a ham-handed approach. (But what else do you expect from football?) I can hear the hundreds of questions coming in already: What about after the game? What if my baby is born (or insert any other totally-non-game-related thing here) on a game day?
  
  There will always be events within an organization that are secret and cannot be spread yet. The NFL is trying to approach these with a sledgehammer, but the germ of an age-old idea is there: some projects or meetings must begin with "And by the way, this is company confidential, please don't share this outside these walls." With extra emphasis in these social media times.

• The Marines have banned Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace entirely from their computers. I give them a large pass on making that kind of blanket approach, since unlike most offices, when Marines are on duty it's truly a 24/7 life. But even the Marines have only put the ban in place for a year while they sort out security issues, and only for the military computers - so in theory, marines who aren't deployed can still log into Facebook, etc. from home at the end of the day. What kind of guidance is the Marines giving to their marines for that home use?

It's smart - and becoming essential - to provide your organization with guidance and education about the proper use of social networks. The spread of information is like a flood: you can't stop it, but you can do a lot to channel it in directions you'd rather it go.

For a couple of stellar examples of corporate Web 2.0 policies, IBM and Sun have made theirs publicly available and are great examples to take inspiration from if you need to build up your own.