Thursday, July 10, 2008

Service Level Agreement for Social Media Services



Social Media tools can enhance the collaboration and relationship building an organization has with its various integrated communications publics. Marketing aside, functions such as employee relations, investor relations, government relations and vendor communications can all be enhanced through these tools. Both commercial packages such as Microsoft Sharepoint Server and Open Source software such as Mango, CanvasWiki, Galleon, WordPress, TypePad and many others are also available. Software as a Service blogs such as Blogger.com can be used as well.

Groups using commercial or Open Source social media need to enlist the services of information technology professionals to support the system. To eliminate misunderstanding and wrong expectations, a service level agreement should be executed between the IT support professionals and the group using the social media.

The service should be described and the functions provided should be listed. These should include the maintenance functions that will be needed and the time windows when maintenance will be performed. Also those functions that are specifically excluded should be listed. Another important point is to identify who is responsible for customizing the site.

The high level information technology architecture should be described and this should include the security model. Performance goals to get a blog site back in operation should be established , and a set of response performance measures should be agreed to.

An example agreement is located at Social_Media_SLA

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