Social Media Guidelines

INTRODUCTION

Whether you’re a physician using social media as a part of the patient experience or a staff member who’s been charged with the exciting task of growing a social media presence for an administrative unit, you’ll find these guidelines helpful in navigating the quickly evolving world of social technologies.

Online social technologies make the excellent research, teaching, and public service taking place at U of U Health even more accessible. We believe it is important for all university units, physicians, and staff to be aware of social media and how social technologies can help you create and nurture relationships, share information, advance knowledge, raise awareness, build support, participate in important conversations, and collaborate on new ideas.

If we incorporate engaging with social media as a part of our overall communications about the university, we can more effectively tell the amazing stories about our people, places, and programs, and support the university’s mission to improve the quality of life for the people of Utah, the nation, and the world.

We think social media provide fun and creative ways to interact with people you might not otherwise hear from with more traditional tools. Each college, school and unit—and individual faculty and staff members—at the university should evaluate what, if any, social media technologies are appropriate for their communication needs. These guidelines aim to ensure appropriate and effective use of social media. The guidelines will evolve as social media evolve.

GUIDELINES FOR PHYSICIAN & STAFF

These social media guidelines pertain to your professional interests as a physician or staff member of University of Utah Health and how you represent the university and your college, school, or department. This document doesn’t address publishing or regulating personal content on privately maintained social media platforms.

  • Talk with your supervisor if you have questions about how these social media guidelines fit with your unit’s communications plan or if you have questions about other university-wide policies.

  • You are personally responsible for the content you post on university-managed social media properties – from blogs and microblogs to social networks, forums, and other social media platforms.

  • Physicians can have personal social media accounts (non-university site) and showcase patient outcomes and/or market their expertise if they have written permission from the patient.

    • If patient outcomes are posted to personal social media accounts, physicians must indicate that the patients are from University of Utah Health and/or the procedure took place at University of Utah Health. This can either be noted in the account bio or the post caption.

  • It’s important to be transparent to your audience when posting on behalf of the university about work-related matters or other issues related to the university. Be sure to identify yourself with your name and affiliation to the university when contributing your personal comments and statements on a university-managed social media property.

    • Examples of disclosure methods could include @usernames that contain Utah and/or your unit name, a link to a bio or “about me” page, or a statement in the post itself, such as “I work for University of Utah Health, and this is my personal opinion.”
    • Posts that don’t mention work-related topics won’t need to reference your university relationship.

  • Follow copyright and fair use laws to the letter.

  • Be aware of and follow HIPAA guidelines.

  • Protect confidential or personal information from University of Utah Health and of patients, faculty, or staff members.

  • Assume conversations about U of U Health are internal and private. Ask permission prior to sharing these conversations via social media properties.

  • Always show respect. Don’t publish content containing slurs, personal insults or attacks, profanity, or obscenity, and don’t engage in any conduct on a social media site that would not be acceptable in U of U Health workplaces. When maintaining or contributing to university-managed social media properties, we should follow the same standards of nondiscrimination and social conduct as outlined by equal opportunity services at the university. We should also expect the same of our visitors to the university’s social media outlets.

  • Be aware of your association with U of U Health in online social networks. Your profile and content should be consistent in the manner you wish to present yourself to colleagues, patients, parents, students, and others.

GUIDELINES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA PROPERTY/COMMUNITY MANAGERS

  • Follow the guidelines for physicians and staff found above.

  • Before debuting a social media initiative, please contact your marketing and communications representative first. If you don’t know who your marketing and communications contact is please email brand@hsc.utah.edu. You should have or develop a social media strategy that should be a part of your unit’s overall marketing and communications plan. This strategy should be approved by your unit leader before releasing the social media property to the public.

  • A social media strategy first involves an assessment of your:

    • Communication goals and objectives,
    • Audience needs and interests,
    • Maintenance and content creation resources, and whether a given social media technology is an appropriate channel to meet those needs.

  • Based on that evaluation, if your unit decides to pursue using a social media platform, the strategy you create should reflect at least these five key areas:

  1. Listening: Find and monitor the conversations already taking place in the social media sphere about the university, your unit, and your subject of interest.
  2. Influencing: Identify and follow key influencers in your target subject of interest and learn what they find valuable in the social media realm.
  3. Engaging: Develop creative ways to provide value to your audiences through exclusive content, events, advice, multimedia, and more on your social media sites.
  4. Converting: Persuade your audiences to act on behalf of the university and your unit, whether it’s for information sharing or relationship building or through their influence, time, or money.
  5. Measuring: Ensure your social media effort is on the road to success by returning regularly to your pre-defined measurable goals and objectives. If your unit does not have an overall marketing and communications plan with which you can align your social media strategy or if you need help conducting an assessment or developing your social media strategy, contact and work with your unit’s media representative and/or University of Utah Health’s Marketing & Communications.

  • Provide your official University of Utah Health social media site URLs to the U of U Health Marketing & Communications Interactive team to be included in the university’s social media directory. Doing so encourages cross-site collaboration with all university-managed social media properties and creates a one-stop directory for the university community and the university’s web audiences to connect with our social media platforms.

  • Social media sites at the university should be marked “official” in some way, where appropriate (for example, in a Twitter bio or in the Facebook “about” section) and follow U of U Health brand and visual guidelines.

  • Official University of Utah Health social media properties should provide contact names and email addresses or correct website URLs that point back to the U of U Health web properties.

  • Where appropriate, guidelines should be posted on University of Utah Health social media sites that make clear expectations of community members—as well as of its site managers.

  • All University of Utah Health social media sites should be monitored (and moderated, where appropriate) to ensure the community is following the unit-developed site and comments guidelines.

  • It’s encouraged to link to U of U Health websites, online giving pages, and the like, from university-managed social media sites. However, don’t link to password-protected University of Utah Health services from third-party social media properties. If you wish to direct someone to a service, link to a university-owned web page that then directs visitors to the password protected site. For example, “To access this service, visit [department home page] and log in to CIS.”

  • University of Utah Health-managed social media sites should not host advertising. On third-party social media platforms, if ads can be turned off on university pages, they should be. On sites such as Facebook where ads can’t be eliminated without significant investment, the units should make sure the benefit of being on Facebook outweighs the risks of advertising being hosted on the page.

  • All University of Utah Health-managed social media sites should meet the university’s information security office standards. It is imperative to control the administration of organizational social media accounts; that is, keep the number of administrative publishers to a minimum and have rules in place for managing login credentials. Don’t share your social media passwords around the workplace or classroom.

  • All University of Utah Health-managed social media sites should adhere to web accessibility best practices. University pages on third-party social media sites should make the best effort to follow web accessibility guidelines. University-managed social media sites can be hosted by third parties as long as they meet web accessibility and information security office guidelines.

  • Agencies working on behalf of University of Utah Health must also follow these guidelines, including disclosing their business affiliation.

NEED HELP?

If you have questions about this social media guidelines document or if you discover inappropriate behavior on a University of Utah-managed social media property contact Alex Boulanger, University of Utah Health, Social Media Manager.

May, 2021