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General Information
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September 11, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 23
Page(s) 39 in print issue
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Twitter: Friend Or Foe?
Gauging The Role & Reasonable Limits Of Social Media In The Workplace
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| Key Points
• Although the popularity of social media is higher than ever, the medium remains in its early stages, causing confusion in terms of risks, management, and policy.
• Because of the individualistic nature of Twitter and similar sites, employees can find themselves becoming the voices of their organizations, even when they’re not formally sanctioned to do so.
• Building and enforcing a policy can help organizations control what employees are posting on social media sites to not only avoid risks but also take advantage of marketing and other opportunities. | As the social media craze moves forward with unparalleled momentum, organizations that have yet to embrace the phenomenon are apt to wonder if they’re missing a game-changing boat. But although tools such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook certainly deliver an opportunity to increase business awareness, they also introduce a potentially overwhelming set of challenges that can leave organizations scrambling to find solutions.
“Social media sites are all the rage today,” says Laurent Duperval, president of Duperval Consulting. “We are still in a learning process, trying to figure out how to use these tools as efficaciously as possible. It is similar to what we went through with email and the Internet. At first, access was limited until eventually it was possible to build a business case for the use of such technologies. Then, access was granted to everyone.”
Because of their ability to stretch communication to the far-flung reaches of the Internet, Twitter and similar sites boast potential like few other business tools to date. But that same power can unleash a host of security, privacy, and legal downfalls, driving home the importance of approaching the medium with a careful, strategic gait.
 Walking The Social Tightrope
Rarely do you hear a colleague say, “We’re on Twitter.” The social media medium is largely individualistic, with users preferring to interact with individual people rather than corporate brands, explains Patrick Schwerdtfeger, author of “Webify Your Business: Internet Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed.” This presents a challenge for enterprises and is compounded when a corporate brand employs hundreds or thousands of people who regularly discuss their jobs on these social platforms.
“The result is a blurred and often contradictory distinction between official corporate communication and unofficial experiences as expressed by individual people, and it can have a disastrous impact on a company’s public image. Although corporate executives will increasingly attempt to regulate their employees’ social media activities, the trends pointing against them will inevitably win in the end. The only way for corporations to protect themselves against negative social media commentary is to treat their employees and customers with integrity and respect,” Schwerdtfeger says.
According to Bart Lazar, an intellectual property expert and partner in the Chicago office of Seyfarth Shaw, the potential legal liabilities of social networking are extensive, particularly because user-generated content in these media can be hard or even impossible to alter or delete. As such, he recommends that official enterprise spokespeople be trained in social messaging and that other employees be limited—through policies, training, or other methods—to prevent them from claiming to be unofficial or even official enterprise representatives.
Determining where to draw the lines with social media is a tricky proposition, especially as more employees become heavily involved with the sites. Duperval notes that with so many different platforms, monitoring becomes an issue. Do you give access to all the sites or just a few? Do you let users install all applications and add-ons? If employees have Facebook pages, do they need to maintain separate profiles for work and personal life? For example, while Duperval acknowledges the value of a Facebook page for members of a marketing team, he questions the value of other tools.
Power Through Policy
Despite the risk potential, experts are quick to identify social media sites as excellent marketing tools. Social media strategist and speaker Jennifer Lindsay notes that small and midsized enterprises—especially technology companies—can use Twitter and LinkedIn to gain name recognition among key influencers and decision makers in a more effective and measurable way than past methods. SMEs can also harness the tools to showcase deep subject matter expertise.
“This is key on LinkedIn, where the community ranks experts. Not taking advantage of the inherent benefits of this platform could be perceived as weakness by competitors. Risk must always be measured before engaging in any social media programs in the enterprise, but properly executed, the pros should outweigh the cons by far,” Lindsay says.
To decrease time wasted on efforts not sanctioned by the company, Lindsay recommends working closely with company counsel and human resources to construct a social media policy that covers the specific needs of the business. She says that human resources must in turn learn to consistently enforce the policy, which should include a clear, but broad, definition of scrutinized sites, including internal and external blogs and wikis and social networking and rich media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo! Groups, Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube.
Duperval adds that a social media policy depends on the business advantage delivered by the use of social media sites. To determine the business advantage, an organization should identify its goals (What are we trying to achieve with social media? Market? Exposure? Customer service?) and return on investment (If employees are spending two hours each day on social media sites, what gains is the company making?). ROI metrics can be tangible (increased sales, reduced costs) or intangible (better goodwill, better service to customers), he says.
Social Saturation
A small study conducted earlier this year at Sri Lanka’s University of Moratuwa drew attention to yet another drawback of social media: network utilization. The study claims that sites such as Facebook not only consume bandwidth but also contribute to an “exponential” increase in DNS traffic as they pull content from across the Internet. Further, to help boost site efficiency, Facebook automatically caches all of the photos in an album, even though the user might not want to view all of the images.
Regardless of whether organizations ultimately feel any network-related effects of social media usage, it remains essential to recognize that employees themselves are both the biggest assets and biggest potential liabilities in the social media realm. “All companies, whether they are engaged formally in social media or not, need to think about how to leverage [their employees] to best expand programs and translate programs from the real world to the online world,” Lindsay says. 
by Christian Perry
Social Liability Risks
Bart Lazar, an intellectual property expert and partner in the Chicago office of Seyfarth Shaw, identifies the top potential liability issues organizations face when dealing with social networking sites.
• Intellectual property infringement. Posting or exchanging infringing content could raise issues of copyright infringement, trademark infringement, or right of publicity.
• Defamation/trade libel. False or deceptively misleading statements of fact posted about an individual or company could be the basis for legal action.
• Trade secret/confidential information. A simple post could give away a company’s valuable information or reveal something that a company intends to do and hurt the company in the marketplace. If you reveal someone else’s confidential information, that could also be the basis for legal action.
• SEC issues. Misrepresented, false, deceptive, or forward-looking statements could run afoul of SEC regulations.
• Transparency/hidden spokesperson. If a person is paid (directly or indirectly) to post information about the company, this should be disclosed.
• Potential employment issues. This can include disparate treatment in terms of selective permission/enforcement, wage and hour claims, or harassment in the workplace.
• Misuse of personal information. If a company collects personal information from visitors, the same principles of information collection relating to the company’s Web site would apply. |
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