Brand guidelines not fit for purpose

I've just been looking through two sets of brand guidelines, both for household-name b2b brands. They are nice, shiny, well produced documents. Look great in print. But I'm looking for guidance on how we use the brands for online projects we're planning.

What we need to know - and I think should reasonably expect of proper, complete, fully-rounded brand guidelines - is how the brands should live in the online environment.

And nope, there's nothing there. It's completely absent. It doesn't appear seem to have been considered at all. They aren't even that old - the last one was produced in 2008.

So I've come to the conclusion that most of what these 'guidelines' contain is a now total irrelevance to the way a brand needs to be used now.

They are not so much 'guidelines', more 'rules'. They are still obsessed by control - of telling you dos and don'ts, of defining safe areas, of how a business card looks, of telling you exactly how to describe the business in 25, 50 or 100 words. It's all one way and feels very 'old school'. But that age of marketing has gone. We don't need old-style 'brand police'; we need 'brand mentors'.

They are also obsessed with print representation and barely consider how the brand is rendered online, let alone how the brand lives online in our connected, converged world. This should be the first place they are tested.

So this is what I think any brand guidelines of 2009 should contain:

• Our brand online (that would be good starting point)
• How the user should experience our brand online
• How our company blogs
• How we present ourselves on social media
• How we look to encourage participation with our brand
• How we participate with other conversions/groups
• How to monitor our brand online
• How we tweet
• How website behaviours and interactions
• How we use microsites and landing pages
• Tone of voice and copy guidelines that consider SEO
  

I'd be interested to know what others think should be included?