The employee social media guidelines for The Crimson White, the University of Alabama's student-run newspaper. Credit: Wesley Vaughn (Twitter @WesleyVaughn)

1. Crimson White Social Media Guidelines
By the Outreach Team
Our goals:
1. Create and foster an online conversation amongst students.
2. Promote the work of the CW.
How You Can Help
1) Create/Get on your account.
a) For Twitter: Message @TheCrimsonWhite and remind us to put you on the “CW Staff”
Twitter list.
b) For Facebook: Like our fan page and suggest it to all of your friends at UA.
2) Join the discussion.
a) Why should students think they should comment to the CW if their own staffers aren’t in
on the online conversation?
b) For Twitter: Simply include our hashtags into your tweets, mention @TheCrimsonWhite,
and retweet us on occasion.
c) For Facebook/Twitter: If you see your friends discussing a campus issue, let us know so
we can respond to it and hopefully start an online conversation.
3) Just tweet it, tweet it. Let some other people read it. Showin’ how funky and strong is your
write. It doesn’t matter if it’s dense or light. So tweet it, just tweet it.
a) Tweet and Facebook your work at the Crimson White.
b) You are promoting yourself and the paper.

2. c) You also get much more rational comments via social media than the comments on the
CW website.
4) Keep your profiles objective; keep your journalistic integrity.
a) Don’t tweet or post anything that would violate your neutrality.
b) Don’t join or like groups that would violate your neutrality.
c) Following certain Twitter users does not violate this though, since it is not viewed as an
endorsement and is a form of information gathering.
d) Examples
i) Joining “This Person for SGA President” = bad
ii) Following @NameforSGA = acceptable
iii) Posting/Tweeting “This campus organization is not to my liking” = bad
iv) Posting/Tweeting “This campus organization recently did whatever. What does
everyone think about it?” = acceptable
5) Don’t act a fool.
a) You represent the Crimson White when you go somewhere and when you say something
on Twitter and Facebook.
b) However much we like crisis management, we would rather not.
c) Violations will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis by the editors.