10 Things To Know About Liability In The Social Media World

With the explosion of websites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, in-house counsel should give careful consideration to the unique problems social media presents, how it affects the workplace, and how to address employees’ and third parties’ social media usage.

As with the rise of the Internet and blogs, existing employee and intellectual property issues play out in the social media world in sometimes surprising ways, creating new challenges and problems for in-house counsel. Social media has the capability to dramatically increase these problems and challenges by providing a much larger, well-connected audience. The following are some specific, brief considerations that in-house counsel should analyze and address with company employees.

1. Secrets are gone in a flash (or click).
2. Employee posts in social media may be protected speech
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3. Employee posts may subject the company to liability.
4. Employee posts may prompt federal administrative action.
5. Social media provides an exponentially bigger, real-time audience for traditional employee-relations problems.
6. Using social media as a recruiting tool can backfire.
7. Registering user names is a cost-effective, protective measure.
8. Implementing social media policies is becoming a best practice
9. The best defense is a good offense
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10. Social media adds litigation considerations.

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Are You Afflicted With Social Media Proliferation?

Between Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, Flickr, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms, the average enterprise-class company has 178 corporate-owned social media accounts.

That’s according to a new report from Altimeter Group, which surveyed 140 companies with more than 1,000 employees. Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter and the lead author of that report, says 178 are way too many, particularly because such accounts often lose steam after a while and go dormant.

“It’s just a poor customer experience, because it’s been abandoned,” he says.

It’s time to take a hard look at your company’s social media presence and pare down its accounts. A new Altimeter report offers an eight-point resource checklist to help.

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Study Predicts Growing Use Of Social Media In Healthcare

A recent study concluded that social media would continue to be a factor for healthcare providers and consumers while at the same time, ambiguous regulations, privacy concerns and a host of other factors limit how patients and healthcare providers use social media

Once these hurdles are overcome, the PwC report said, social media “will open new opportunities to improve health delivery and outcomes

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Deluxe Corporation Project REV

Very interesting presentation by Deluxe Corporation’s SEM and Social Media Manager, Nathan Eide.

Nathan shares how they launched a social media campaign to create brand awareness and gain customer feedback and insights on its products.

Nathan shows how you can raise awareness to your brand, gather intelligence on your product and services, do product development using social media

 

What where the top strategic priorities for social media marketing in 2011

A study recently released by Marketing Sherpa polling CMOs (Chief Marketing officers) reveals the top strategic priorities for social media marketing in 2011

  • Recruiting interdepartmental staff to perform social marketing activities 8%
  • Improving the quality and cost efficiency of customer support programs 9%
  • Integrating social media monitoring and analytics into a single dashboard 11%
  • Integrating social marketing data with CRM and other marketing systems 21%
  • Achieving or increasing measureable lead generation from social marketing 43%
  • Achieving or increasing measureable ROI from social marketing programs 46%
  • Improving search engine ranking positions 50%
  • Developing an effective and methodical social marketing strategy 53%
  • Converting social media members, followers, etc.into paying customers 63%
  • Improving brand awareness or reputation 66%
  • Increasing website traffic through social media integration 71%

 

Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay

Everybody wants to be liked. The question for Facebook Inc. is how much advertisers are willing to pay for the opportunity.

Facebook’s estimated market value, now in the neighborhood of $70 billion, is founded on the belief that companies will spend big to advertise on the site. Facebook’s revenues, which come largely from ads, were $1.6 billion in the first half of this year, up $800 million from a year earlier.

But most of its ads were for small advertisers, such as local businesses and small-scale websites, according to comScore Inc. Facebook is under pressure to grow its advertising on a grand scale, and to snag the sort of big brand names who now drive billions of dollars to TV, radio and print campaigns

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REI: Going Local on social media

REI’s Digital Engagement Manager, Jordan Williams, discussed how they utilize social media sites for each REI store to develop a better local connection with their customers.

A must see for retailers and any company that ventures into social media

Social Media 001: Page or Profile? That is the question

As more organizations get on the social media bandwagon, it becomes more and more obvious that there is some serious confusion as to what type of page they should use for their online presence.

Whether on LinkedIn or Facebook (Google has only allowed a few organization to test the Google + business accounts and is seriously enforcing their policy of not allowing businesses and organizations using personal accounts), users are confused, misinformed or uninformed about the differences between profiles and pages.

Few users read the TOSs and who can blame them, pages after pages of boring legal mumbo jumbo that would put to sleep a toddler on a sugar high.

Not knowing the differences can have costly repercussions.

Before going public, LinkedIn was notorious for enforcing its TOS, especially when it comes to organizations using personal profiles.  Facebook was enforcing as well, but with the vastly higher number of users, enforcement was spottier.

One can expect that enforcement will become stricter again in the future as the companies start focusing again on quality versus quantity.

What is the big deal? You might ask.

The big deal is choosing the wrong format can be costly in many ways.  Imagine logging on to your page only to find out that your account has been suspended and there is nowhere to turn to have it restored.  Imagine having to do the work all over again, rebuild your network of followers, your content, earning comments and ratings.

What figure can you put on rebuilding your social media presence?  What is the cost in term of time wasted, lost goodwill, lost followers?

The rule:

Generally speaking (most social media platforms use the same basic principle)

  • A “profile” is a “personal profile”, a live individual, not an organization, not a company.
  • A “page” in the Facebook lingo is for an organization, company, brand.  Public personalities, artists, athletes… when using the account for business purpose should use the “page” versus “profile” for one good reason, they are usually doing it to promote their brand. LinkedIn has its own version of the “page”

Using the wrong format will also limit what you can do.

Due to their original design, pages and profiles have different built in tools and using a profile for a business entity can seriously limit your reach in term of communication, exposure, engagement, measurement and visibility and that’s the subject of an upcoming post.