Publishing digital content is a full time job, and for many of us it is one that we very much enjoy. We tend to focus on aspects such as our website UI, mobile application navigation, or SEO optimization.

Legal and regulatory requirements around digital, or worry that we might put our organizations at risk by publishing the wrong thing or portraying our services in the wrong light, is a fleeting thought, left to the legal or compliance department to consider. We often feel protected by the privacy and accessibility statements found in the footer of the webpage or the legalese that is written into the mobile app installation script.

While you may feel secure with you content publishing approach, there may be significant risks associated with the actual content and the channels you are using for your organizations. This is where digital policies come in. Digital policies are the rules of the road for digital and they tell all of us working in the digital space what we should and should not do in order to create good content and also protect our organization, our clients, and ourselves from issues of brand, legal, and regulatory risk that might arise.

I recently wrote a primer on digital policies, published by Smashing Magazine, and encourage you to familiarize yourself with policies and how they might impact what you do in the digital space. If it is not your job to worry about policies for the organization, you should understand whose job it is and prompt them to give you guidance so that you can be creative with content creation and publication, knowing that you won’t end up with legal troubles or online embarrassing situations.

Photo by Samuel Zeller