Every company thinking about being active in social media needs to have some sort of policy around transparency and disclosure. The debates seems to be how heavy handed do you make your policy? Do you leave no room for doubt? Do you take a hands off approach?

Some policy’s range from Microsoft’s “Don’t do anything stupid.” to more complex lawyer written policies. Some recommend a simple URL link in a blog comment as enough transparency while companies like Dell require employees to add ‘atDell” to the end of their names.

At HP, management refers employees to our existing Standards of Business Conduct with some additional guidelines specific to social media. In those additional guidelines the overarching theme is full disclosure, transparency and respect but it’s largely left open to individual interpretation.

What if your company doesn’t have a stated social media policy? The Blog Council has just released a do-it-yourself Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit.

From the announcement:

Go to http://blogcouncil.org/disclosure and make it your own:

• Discuss, comment, critique, contribute
• Create your own policy
• Share your version with the community

This is a great starting point. What is your companies policy? Do you have a disclosure policy, or a general social media policy? What do you think is missing from most corporate policies? Is there one approach that’s better than another?

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About the Author: Tac Anderson is a contributing writer for ConversationsMatter.org.