Your Social Media Strategy- 5 Ways to Stay Out of Legal Trouble
Social media use for your business and by your employees creates new conversations, opportunities and unfortunately, potential legal pitfalls. An awareness of the legal issues that are raised by social media use, and a bit of thoughtful planning go a long way to avoid these pitfalls.
Here is a quick checklist of common legal concerns to think about when using social media, and how to plan for them:
1. Protect your trademarks.
Each new evolution of the internet creates more exposure opportunities for your business, making your company’s brands and trademarks increasingly valuable. Invest the time and money necessary to register them at the federal and state levels, maintain those registrations, and enforce your trademarks when you see anyone else misappropriating or abusing them on social media sites.
2. Respect copyrights.
The informal nature of the internet (especially postings on social media sites), and the sheer volume of information available makes the reproduction or “borrowing” of content very tempting. Remember that whomever created the content probably owns the copyright in it, even if someone else republished it (with or without permission). Obtain written permission from the original creator of any content you want to republish on your blog, fan page, or Tweet, and always provide attribution to the source of any content that is not your original work.
3.Do not ignore domain name registrations.
Your company’s “traditional” web presence is still highly valuable, and in most cases remains the front gate to your online image. Don’t let the popularity of social media tools allow you to become lax about registering, and maintaining registrations of, your domain names and names similar. If you have a legitimate business purpose for owning a domain name, buy it and renew the registrations regularly. If someone else is cybersquatting on a domain name that is similar to yours in bad faith, demand that they stop.
4. Be and hold others accountable.
You can’t legally stop an angry customer from complaining about your service in his next Tweet – if a statement is true, or clearly an opinion, it’s fair game. But if someone posts false information about your company, your products or your employees, you can and should take prompt legal action to stop it. This is simple good public relations strategy but “on steroids” given the immediacy of social media tools. Remember that laws prohibiting false advertising are still very much enforceable regardless of the evolution of technology. By the way, this applies to everything you and your employees post about others as well.
5.Guide your employees.
You can’t keep your employees off of social media sites (nor should you want to – they can and should be your best ambassadors). But you can and should provide clear guidelines about their social media usage in two situations – when they are posting as an identified company employee, or when they are using work time to participate in social media. Those policies should address at least the following topics:
- Rules for use of social media on company time.
- Discussion of company business and confidential information on social media.
- Content guidelines, including permissions policies and a prohibition against posting any derogatory or illegal material.
- Designation of a specific person or office to speak officially on the company’s behalf in social media outlets.
These proactive steps are not difficult to implement, but they do take planning and some require a modest investment of financial resources. However, it’s less expensive to implement them up front than to address a legal problem created by your social media strategy later.
Submitted by:
Sharon L. Toerek
Licata & Toerek
© 2009 Sharon L. Toerek