Last October, the federal district court in New Jersey upheld a jury decision to hold Hillstone Restaurant Group liable for violations of the Stored Communications Act and New Jersey’s parallel electronic surveillance statute after managers of the restaurant fired two employees due to content the Managers found in a private MySpace group created by the employees.1
The two employees created the MySpace group to discuss their thoughts of the employer in a password protected environment and invited other employees — but not managers — to join. When Managers learned of the group, they asked an employee for access, and read the contents of the private group pages. In those pages, the Managers found negative remarks about the restaurant’s customer service and quality guidelines, references to violence and illegal drug use, and a copy of the new wine exam that would be administered to employees. After reading the content, managers then fired two employees.2
The employee who gave the login information to the Managers was not one of the group’s creators, and she testified that she felt pressure to surrender the information. As a result, the court concluded that the Managers did not have permission to enter the site.
When the suit was originally filed, the plaintiffs charged that the Managers violated the Federal Wiretap Act, New Jersey Wiretap Act, Federal and State Stored Communications Act, along with Invasion of Privacy and Wrongful termination. Some of these statutes carry imprisonment in their potential punishments.
As you think about the policies and guidance you give your employees, provide specific guidance to managers, with the following considerations:
In the absence of reliable evidence that an employee is damaging the employer’s interests or violating company policies, avoid password-protected sites or accounts used by employees.
If you believe that you must seek access to a secured site or account, first consult your lawyer to ensure that your actions are appropriate.
As most of you know, the FTC recently made advertisers liable for affiliates who fail to disclose their relationship to the advertiser and employers liable for employees who make false or unsubstantiated statements in social media regarding the company’s products or services. In fact, many folks are surprised to learn that their participation in the Amazon Associates program — where anyone can get paid for linking to a book on Amazon — makes you an affiliate within the scope of these guidelines.
Technology is rushing to catch up to the needs of advertisers and employers who feel challenged to comply with these FTC requirements, so here are a few suggestions:
Employers
Update your social media policies to reflect the FTC guidelines
Educate your employees — ALL of them
Ensure that your social media listening and monitoring capabilities filter for relevant employee statements
Define and implement a process for handling employee statements that create liability for the company, once they are identified through your listening and monitoring capabilities
Consider implementing one of the emerging technology solutions that aspire to provide scalable, auditable and compliant disclaimers for companies.
Advertisers
Determine the appropriate disclaimers that your affiliates should implement and when they should use them
Define appropriate policies for your affiliates and publish them to your affiliates, as required by FTC guidelines
Consider implementing a technology solution that will automate disclosure standardization, audit trails and analytics
CMP.ly is a new software firm that aims to deliver a scalable compliance management solution which they say will automate FTC-required audit trails with supporting analytics. I do not know whether CMP.ly will win the race to provide a scalable compliance management solution, but they seem to be headed in the right direction.
DISCLOSURE
I have no relationship with CMP.ly, and I provided the above information about their solution based on phone conversations with their CEO and reviews of their product documentation.
Engaging in dialogue with prospects or customers via social media at scale has historically required adding a lot of people at significant cost. As a result, many organizations have been unable to use social media to the extent they would like. Even those organizations who can afford to add the people usually feel challenged to filter, prioritize and respond to the masses of data flowing through social media, but help is on the way.
Technologies are emerging that will let organizations listen and engage at scale without adding lots of people. In addition, these new technologies rapidly accelerate time to resolve and respond to emerging customer needs occurring in the market. Two of those technologies are (1) real-time enterprise search and (2) integration with internal systems (such as CRM and product development applications).
1. Real-time Enterprise Search
As marketers work to create value from the mounds of data flowing through Twitter streams, Facebook status updates, and behavioral targeting tags, they need a faster method to sort, index and access the data. Emerging search technologies with natural language processing are making it happen. In addition, the most effective solutions are integrating sentiment analysis, taxonomy, classification and entity extraction in real time for structured and unstructured data. Joe Hughes of Accenture1 and others refer to this new capability as “integrated search + BI” and “unified information access.”
2. Integration With Internal Systems
The only way for organizations engage in a dialogue with prospects or customers through Twitter and Facebook with the same consistency we expect from phone interactions will require organizations to get their social interaction data into their CRM systems where it can be tracked, measured and managed.
For example, call centers today gather information about product defects and route the information to product development teams who can prioritize and address the defects. In most cases, call center agents use structured menus to place the information into well-defined databases, which allow downstream teams and applications to access the data in a consistent way. But Tweets, status messages and blog posts do not follow a consistent structure, so traditional call center tools are unable to store and route the information. As a result, support agents typically interact in social media with lots of cut-and-paste, and limited ability to store customer information in customer records or product development tools. Technology that can send feedback from customers or call center agents to other channels – with as much automation as possible – will be the only way to derive meaning and take action from all of the data.
As an example, Attivio has developed an engine that can simultaneously identify buzz around a topic (e.g., product bug or service issue) in Twitter, forums, and reviews, then connect with a CRM package to determine whether the topic is already known to Customer Service or should be listed as a new case or defect. That kind of process and technology integration reduces the time to resolve the issue and respond from weeks or months to minutes or hours.2
The chart below lists examples of emerging technologies that help organizations to scale their social media efforts:
Making it all Happen
Because the early adopters of social media have usually been the Marketing and PR teams, making all of this happen will require Marketing and PR to connect their tools and processes with sales, product development and customer support. Doing that at scale will absolutely require thoughtful sharing of selected resources, such as listening, search and text mining tools. It will also require new levels of cross-functional collaboration as departmental leaders determine the metrics, processes and potential cultural changes that tie it all together.
As always, remember that pulling customer data from web-only sources may not appropriately represent your entire customer base, so you may need to integrate additional sources, such as customer surveys and call center logs.
Finally, as you begin to think about using incorporating these technologies into your marketing, sales, support and product development processes, engage you Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing teams, as they are likely to have significant relevant experience to help you succeed.
Mike Mintz is the Community Manager of an online community for lawyers sponsored by the Lexis-Nexis subsidiary Martindale-Hubbell, and I recently enjoyed the privilege of participating in Mike’s series of interviews focused on legal issues in social media. The two segments of my interview are posted below, followed by a listing of additional interviewees.
Judges are ‘friending’ defendants and attorneys within social utilities such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and each U.S. state is starting to determine whether such friending is acceptable. Two notable and conflicting opinions include:
The Florida Judicial Ethics Advisory Committee recently stated that judges may not add lawyers who appear, or could appear, before that judge as ‘friends’ on social networks. (The full opinion is available here). (Source: Tobias Butler)
In October, the South Carolina Judiciary Department first acknowledged the need for public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary, then stated that complete separation of a judge from extra-judicial activities is neither possible nor wise. Specifically, a judge should not become isolated from the community in which the judge lives. As a result, the judge held that “Allowing a Magistrate to be a member of a social networking site allows the community to see how the judge communicates and gives the community a better understanding of the judge. Thus, a judge may be a member of a social networking site such as Facebook.” (www.judicial.state.sc.us/…/displayadvopin.cfm) (Source: John Lipsey).
As John Lipsey notes, friending by these professionals will likely increase as more people grow comfortable with social media over time, and the nature of the relationships will be most important, rather than the mere existance of the relationships. For example, Law.com recently reported a case in Georgia wherein a judge stepped down after 17 years on the bench when officials discovered communications that revealed inappropriate influence between the judge and a defendant he ‘friended’.
Champions of social media within organizations often encounter lots of hurdles as they try to achieve measurable business outcomes using social media. For those internal champions, it can sometimes help to prioritize those hurdles, and work to overcome the hurdles in prioritized order.
The chart below depicts a Social Media Maturity model which can provide a list to help internal champions order their internal hurdles. In this case, the chart displays the distribution of responses from members of the International Association of Business Communicators in Silicon Valley who attended my presentation on Social Media Governance last December, and who named their top internal hurdle preventing their organization from achieving significant measurable outcomes from social media.
As you can see, the participants’ organizations fell across the entire spectrum of challenges that can impede the progress of an internal champion seeking social media success at scale.
If you would like assistance in determining a road map for your organization to achieve measurable business outcomes using social media, contact me any time.
Your social media policies should help you to scale your social media operations and differentiate your organization in the market, but most organizations are still missing the point.
Scaling social media often requires mobilizing and empowering lots of people. Policies help to empower those people while also creating appropriate accountability. Unfortunately, most organizations’ policies simply mitigate risk.
In addition, the costs of creating social media guidelines are very small, but the potential benefits are very large. As organizations figure this out, social media policies tend to evolve through three stages: Mitigation, Information and Differentiation (see figure below):
1. Mitigation
Mitigation policies protect the organization from risk and liability. Such policies usually contain guidelines such as, “respect copyright”, “link to sources” and “do not post pornography”. These policies are usually prepared in quick reaction to a perceived need to protect the company from liability or potential employee actions that could negatively impact the organization. These guidelines are often useful and necessary, but they are essentially the same for all organizations, and they do not help the organization to create value. Most social media policies fall into this category.
2. Information
When organizations begin to understand the true potential benefits and risks of social media, they begin to consider guidelines that are more unique to their organization. Such guidelines provide valuable Information to employees, and often occur in two forms, as follows:
First, organizations provide boundaries that help employees utilize social media more consistently with the goals and norms of the organization, rather than leaving employees guessing. These policies vary by organization. For example, organizations provide guidelines regarding the use of the organization’s trademarks in personal social media. Some organizations allow employees to use the organization’s trademarks in personal social media; some organizations do not.
Second, organizations may think ahead of their employees and provide guidelines that help employees protect themselves in their social media interactions. For example, an organization whose employees interact with customers on Facebook might tell employees which fields to exclude from their Facebook profile for the safety of the employee. This type of guidance requires thoughtful consideration of the organization’s culture, customer expectations and the types of interactions between employees and customers.
3. Differentiation
Differentiation policies give employees guidance, best practices and data that helps them to differentiate their organization in the market. Examples of such policies might include the company’s best practices for engaging customers on LinkedIn in ways that are consistent with the company’s brand.
In addition, leading companies incorporate guidelines that support their customer and employee data models with the goal of enhancing their 360-degree view of customers.
Guidelines that differentiate an organization are the most difficult to create, because they require thoughtful consideration of the organization’s social media objectives and operational knowledge of effective practices in social media.
Also, deployment of such guidelines may require ongoing communications, training or even technical support to employees. As a result, very few organizations provide such guidelines to their employees today. For example, an organization that wants to fully leverage employee LinkedIn relationships might audit or monitor their employees’ LinkedIn profiles to ensure appropriate search engine optimization of the profiles.
The Future
Social media policies can be important enablers of social media operations at scale by helping to provide the right levels of empowerment with accountability for business results. As organizations realize the role that social media policies can play in scaling social media operations, more and more organizations will evolve toward guidelines that differentiate, rather than simply mitigate.
I recently analyzed all of the 113 policy documents that people from around the world have submitted into my Social Media Policy Database. You can download the report and see what I found regarding the following questions:
To what extent do organizations focus on risks versus opportunities in social media?
What types of guidelines do organizations provide to employees?
How are organizations providing guidance to employees who represent the organization in social media?
Last October, the federal district court in New Jersey upheld a jury decision to hold Hillstone Restaurant Group liable for violations of the Stored Communications Act and New Jersey’s parallel electronic surveillance statute after managers of the restaurant fired two employees due to content the Managers found in a private MySpace group created by the employees.1
Today I enabled RSS on the Social Media Research database, so you can automatically receive links to new reports when they are added. 
As most of you know, the FTC recently made advertisers liable for affiliates who fail to disclose their relationship to the advertiser and employers liable for employees who make false or unsubstantiated statements in social media regarding the company’s products or services. In fact, many folks are surprised to learn that their participation in the Amazon Associates program — where anyone can get paid for linking to a book on Amazon — makes you an affiliate within the scope of these guidelines.
Engaging in dialogue with prospects or customers via social media at scale has historically required adding a lot of people at significant cost. As a result, many organizations have been unable to use social media to the extent they would like. Even those organizations who can afford to add the people usually feel challenged to filter, prioritize and respond to the masses of data flowing through social media, but help is on the way.
