According to the Wall Street Journal, the New York City Ballet is becoming one of the first major performing arts groups to create a social media policy due to some impolitic tweets by one of their dancers. The proposed policy would:
“…require dancers to include a disclaimer specifying that their comments are not employer-sanctioned, according to a copy of a draft reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
It would also ban them from disclosing another dancer’s injury or illness, and from posting photographs of company events, or of “persons engaged in New York City Ballet business without their consent.”
“Additionally, in order to protect its interests, NYCB reserves the right to monitor…postings that are available to the general public or those that are not privacy-protected about the company, its employees and its activities,” the draft says.”
According to the article, the union representing the dancers doesn’t see a need for a policy. But as many other arts management bloggers (and probably not a few lawyers) have written, it is good to have a policy of some sort and make sure everyone is aware of it.
Even if it is a very relaxed policy, you should have at least engaged in a decision making process about what your approach will be, what place social media will have in your organizational goals, how social media practices mesh with your corporate culture and what possible consequences may arise for your company should people reveal information or make offensive statements.
As I read the City Ballet’s policy I think some of it may be a little overly protective. I was reminded as I often am, of the Chris Lavin article about art and sports that I wrote about in one of my first blog posts. Specifically, I am recalling his comments about how performing arts organizations’ approach to providing access was “like a cross between the Kremlin and the Vatican.”
We read about athlete injuries all the time. Is it a trade secret that dancers sustain injuries? We hear about people performing while they are ravaged by sickness. Heck, the one phrase familiar to people who aren’t really interested in the arts at all is, “the show must go on.” It is almost a foregone conclusion that people will soldier through pain and sickness. It isn’t that a dancer’s career is any more precarious than an athlete’s if news of chronic injuries becomes public. Though granted, the athlete has often accumulated a fair bit more money by that time.
The bit in their policy about reserving the right to monitor with the unspoken “and take action we deem appropriate” hanging there may appear to be counter to efforts to use social media to broaden the City Ballet’s appeal. The real proof though is in how great their degree of tolerance for what is posted and how strictly they enforce consequences. A phrase like that is almost a given in a social media policy for most companies, a fact the Wall Street journal acknowledges. It lets people know you will be watching so no one can claim ignorance.
The tricky part though is in uniformly applying whatever criteria your organization has about what subjects and language are permissible. If a person is fired for saying something they feel an earlier incident that went unpunished created a precedent for, they may have a basis for claiming they were improperly dismissed.
This is completely bogus. I’ve recently been reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, which despite being a twelve-year-old document about the web, remains quite fresh.
One of the main theses of Cluetrain is that “Markets are conversations.” People can smell mediated corporate BS a mile away. Cluetrain predates what we consider to be “social media,” but the concepts are as sound as ever.
The reason social media works is that it allows people to interact with artists and connect with them on a personal level. Performers should use social media the same way other people use it. Tell us what’s going on. People can’t connect with a PR spinfest.
David-
Thanks for the response. I agree people can see the mediated stuff a mile away. I don’t think that is necessarily what the policy is forcing the dancers to do. Basically, it puts people on warning that they are being watched and there may be some consequences attached to what they say. Whether a policy is heavy handed or not, better that it is clearly verbalized than completely subject to capricious whim.
Ultimately though, the ballet or any business can’t stop the conversation with this sort of policy. It is too easy to create multiple identities on the various social media fora. The dancers will talk about their favorite snacks and shoes and how tired they are after a performance via their public personae and channel the snark through other avatars.
Certainly, there is a very fine line between proper and improper behavior regarding artist employees using personal social media account to discuss employer related activity. What I’ve noticed about most policies is they tend to suffer from a lack of proactive consideration and are hastily composed in response to a negative occurrence.
The results typically shove the pendulum to one extreme or the other and fail to capitalize on creating mutually beneficial solutions.