I recently came across an article that talked about the idea of using Social Service Level Agreements (SSLA). An SSLA would be very similar to a Service Level Agreement (SLA) but would apply to a social network. The name SSLA may send some running but it’s the idea of it that is interesting.

I can certainly see opportunity for businesses who utilize social networks to create SSLAs to define their terms of engagement with their community members. For example, the agreement may define how quickly a business must respond to its community members. If a community member poses a question, someone must respond to it within a certain timeframe.

As I already mentioned, the term SSLA is likely to formal and implies some sort of legality. The agreement can be very informal but the purpose is to spell out what community members can expect. Some ideas around what to include:

• Length of time to respond to community members
• What type of interactions community members might expect (support, direct access to experts, etc.)
• What is deemed acceptable and unacceptable

Bottom line, such an agreement spells out exactly what types of interactions members can expect from a community.

[Photo above by Joshua Rappeneker / CC BY-ND 2.0]

[awsbullet:patty hearst]