Social media guidelines: A reminder to think first and be civil

The Associated Press issued a revised set of social media guidelines last month. You’ll notice a whole bunch of stuff about objectivity.

We don’t worry too much about maintaining a pose of objectivity at Bleacher Report, and we don’t have a formal set of social media guidelines for writers, but the chatter in journalism nerdworld over the AP’s guidelines gave us an excuse to talk a little bit about best practices.

We did just that in a post last year, and this paragraph sums up B/R’s take on social media:

Here’s a standard to work with: Imagine Twitter is a conference at which you’re representing Bleacher Report on a panel. You can be yourself. You might drop in a political opinion, but you wouldn’t say something incendiary. You might swear a little or get into a debate, but you wouldn’t use the C-word or attack someone with language that would get you disinvited to future events—or punched in the nose.

Also take a look at this Twitter guide for writers that then-associate NFL editor Matt Birch wrote for this blog in 2011. He spelled out what you should and shouldn’t do on Twitter, saving the most important guideline for last:

“THINK before you Tweet!”