Sure, your company is experimenting
with social media.
But does it have a social media
policy? And are you taking steps to minimize the potential public embarrassment
-- and worse, legal liability -- that it could bring?
To help make sense of the social
media phenomenon from a business perspective, three attorneys from the Seattle
office of Perkins Coie law firm put
on a seminar this week entitled “Critical Legal Questions for Companies Participating in Social Media.”
The program included practical
suggestions for how to make the most of the various social media while still
protecting your business.
“Social media is changing the way
we do business,” attorney Tom Bell said.
Among the suggestions:
- Develop a social media policy – and
enforce it.
The policy need not be complicated, but it should be clear to everyone. Attorney Brian Flock recommended one that allows for monitoring of off-duty use of social media and blogging, and one that bans anonymous Web comments that mention the company. (It doesn’t look good when it’s revealed that a glowing, anonymous review of your company’s product or service was written by someone who works for you.)
Also, simply trying to ban employees from using social media probably won’t work: Approximately 5 percent of workers maintain personal blogs, and 43 percent of U.S. workers access social media sites at work, according to the presentation.
Sitecrafting, a Tacoma-based Web development company, noticed AWB's "tweeting" of the seminar and offered this advice regarding social media policies.
- Train someone to conduct Web
searches of prospective employees and redact certain information before giving
the information to the person who will make the hiring decision.
It’s possible just by glancing at a
prospective employee’s Facebook page to learn all sort of things that employers
are not legally allowed to ask about during an interview, including age,
sexual orientation and religion. Training someone who is not in a hiring role
to redact that information – while retaining other material that may be useful
– is one way to insulate a company, Flock said.
- Train employees to use privacy
settings.
You may not want employees to post
party photos of themselves on their Facebook pages if some of their clients are
listed among their “friends.” This potential problem can be solved by simply
instructing them to adjust the privacy settings on Facebook so that business
associates will not see their photos.
Other issues to consider:
- How
to protect trade secrets after an employee leaves.
Your company may have a non-compete
clause, but what if a former employee lists all of your clients as contacts on
his or her personal LinkedIn account? Flock recommended training and reminders
about an employee’s obligations.
- Limit blogging on company-sanctioned
blogs to work hours for non-exempt employees.
The presenters also discussed the
marketing possibilities - and pitfalls - posed by social media. The case of
JetBlue illustrates both: The airline was an early adopter of
Twitter and now has more than 500,000 "followers." When one of their
followers missed a connection, he used Twitter to send a message to the airline
and quickly got a reply with an offer to help. The quick response won kudos
from the online community, but the praise turned to criticism when a technical
glitch interfered.
The seminar addressed marketing via
social media, including ways in which Federal Trade Commission guidelines might
apply. There are not a lot of regulations regarding social media, attorney Susan Lyon said. But there
are guidelines, such as one requiring connections between endorsers and sellers
to be disclosed. For example, if a company gives a blogger products to review,
the blogger should say whether he or she is - or is not - being paid by the company.
In some ways, the world of social
media is like the Internet of the mid-1990s, Bell said. There are a lot of
areas that are not clearly defined yet, and certainly many pitfalls for
business leaders to know about.
But that hasn't stopped companies from engaging in social media. Dell Inc., frequently cited as a corporate social media success story, reportedly has surpassed $2 million in sales attributed to its Twitter presence.
And it hasn’t stopped any of the attorneys who
put on the seminar, either.
You can follow them all on Twitter: @tcbell; @susanlyon; and @brianflock
