The FBI brought William Lawrence Cassidy to trial for sending more than 8,000 distressing tweets over 2 months, to a leader of a Buddhist group. During that time, he threatened her life and wrote tweet haikus containing disturbing images of violence. His efforts scared her so much that she refused to leave her house for 18 months, but the judge overseeing the case ruled that Cassidy’s tweets were protected speech under the First Amendment, as they appeared on a public bulletin-board-like forum.

The judge said:

“…while Mr. Cassidy’s speech may have inflicted substantial emotional distress, the government’s indictment here is directed squarely at protected speech: anonymous, uncomfortable Internet speech addressing religious matters.”

According to the New York Times, the judge compared Twitter to communications during the colonial period:

He said, “A blog is like a bulletin board that a person of [the colonial period] might have planted in his front yard. If one colonist wants to see what is on another’s bulletin board, he would need to walk over to his neighbor’s yard and look at what is posted, or hire someone else to do so.”

With Twitter, he went on, news from one colonist’s bulletin board could automatically show up on another’s. The … Read More » Read More…

A few people have emailed me seeking examples of social media policies for schools or school districts, but I don’t have any such examples, so I would like to ask readers to help find any folks who have worked through social media policies for schools. If you send me example policies, suggestions or lessons from working through such school policies, I will gladly publish them on this site.

Please ask anyone you know who works with schools and policies, so we can find and share the best thinking with the many education professionals who are working through the challenges of social media in their schools.

You can send any suggestions here.

Thank you.

Chris Boudreaux helps large organizations develop and implement social media strategies and capabilities, including governance, measurement and operations.

His new book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, shows you how to transform teams, empower employees, integrate partners and mobilize customers to beat the competition in digital and social media. Buy the book on Amazon.

Read More…

In August of this year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched a web site for employees to report violations of securities laws, and if a submissions leads to enforcement by the SEC, the submitter can earn 10 – 30 percent of any fraud recovery or monetary sanctions of over $1 million..

In addition, the SEC will publish a list of 170 enforcement actions taken in the past year, and any whistleblowers involved in those cases can claim their rewards through the site.

Rewards can be substantial. For example: in July 2010, the SEC forced Goldman Sachs to pay $550 million for misleading investors about a subprime mortgage collateralized debt obligation they marketed.

(via Aarti Maharaj at Corporate Secretary magazine)

Chris Boudreaux helps large organizations develop and implement social media strategies and capabilities, including governance, measurement and operations.

His new book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, shows you how to transform teams, empower employees, integrate partners and mobilize customers to beat the competition in digital and social media. Buy the book on Amazon.

Read More…

The leading trade organization for market research professionals — CASRO — published guidelines for anyone conducting market research in social media.

The President of CASRO told research magazine that, “These are not mandated standards. We expect these guidelines will evolve based on changes in the social media environment and research industry. As such, comments, additions and edits are welcome and will be given careful consideration by our task force.”

There has been significant debate in the research community regarding the need for guidelines and standards in social media research. In particular, many researchers argue that such research is unethical without express consent of the consumers whose conversations are analysed. Others argue that any publicly available data is OK to use in market research.

Read CASROs guidelines here.

DISCLOSURE My employer, Converseon, is an active member in CASRO.

Chris Boudreaux helps large organizations develop and implement social media strategies and capabilities, including governance, measurement and operations.

His new book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, shows you how to transform teams, empower employees, integrate partners and mobilize customers to beat the competition in digital and social media. Buy the book on Amazon.

Read More…

In a new book entitled lol… OMG! : What Every Student Needs to Know About Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship, and Cyberbullying, Stanford MBA student Matt Ivester explains the dangers of bad online behavior, based on his experience creating and leading a web service entitled JuicyCampus, starting in 2007. The book explains the dangers of bad online behavior, and offers advice to college students who want to enter the adult world with their reputations intact.

In 2007, Ivester founded JuicyCampus.com and invited students at Duke University to gossip freely and anonymously. When he started it, he thought it would be a fun place for college students, but it soon became, “… this malicious website where students were attacked. It got away from me,” he sid in a recent interview with the Stanford Graduate School of Business. “The posts named names, and they were racist, homophobic, misogynistic, vulgar, sexually explicit, deeply personal,” he wrote in the book’s preface.

JuicyCampus.com spread to 500 campuses, attracted investigations from two state attorneys general, spawned hundreds of complaints from college administrators, students, and parents, and even caught the attention of national broadcaster Katie Couric, who described JuicyCampus as a “malicious cesspool of barbs, disses, and insults.” … Read More » Read More…

The National Labor Relations Board released a report last week that lists the outcomes of investigations into 14 cases involving the use of social media and employers’ social and general media policies, with the goal of helping practitioners in their development of social media policies.

Outcomes included:

Four cases involving employees’ use of Facebook where the NLRB found that employees were engaged in “protected concerted activity” because they were discussing terms and conditions of employment with fellow employees. Five other cases involving Facebook or Twitter posts where the NLRB found that the employee activity was not protected. One case where the NLRB determined that a union engaged in unlawful coercive conduct when it videotaped interviews with employees at a non-union jobsite about their immigration status and posted an edited version on YouTube and the Local Union’s Facebook page. Five cases wherein some provisions of employer’s social media policies was found to be unlawfully overly-broad. One case wherein an employer’s lawful policy restricted its employees’ contact with the media.

I plan to provide actionable details for folks developing policies in the next few days.

Chris Boudreaux helps large organizations develop and implement social media strategies and capabilities, including governance, measurement and operations.

His new book, The Most Powerful … Read More » Read More…

FINRA proposed rule changes to the SEC regarding communications to the public, and the proposed changes simplify rules for financial services firms using social media.

First, FINRA proposed that firms will not need prior approval of content posted on social sites as long as the site qualifies as an interactive electronic forum.

Second, FINRA proposes to reduce the six categories of communications to three, as follows:

Institutional communication: includes all communications that fall within the current guidelines. Retail communication: includes any written (including electronic) communication that is made available to more than 25 retail investors within any 30-day period. Correspondence: includes any written (including electronic) communication that is distributed or made available to 25 or fewer retail investors within any 30-day period.

The proposal eliminates definitions for advertisement, sales literature, institutional sales material, public appearance and independently prepared reprints, and “… communication that currently qualifies as advertisements and sales literature would generally fall under the definition for retail communications.”

Within Retail Communication FINRA proposes a supervisory exemption for:

any retail communication that is posted on an online interactive electronic forum (eg., social networks), and any retail communication that does not make any financial or investment recommendation or otherwise promote a product or service of the member.

All of this … Read More » Read More…

Last week, the Governor of Tennessee signed a law that makes it a crime to “… transmit or display an image…” online that is likely to “… frighten, intimidate or cause emotional distress… ” to someone who sees it. Violations can earn offenders nearly a year in jail time or up to $2,500 in fines.

The “emotionally distressed” individual need not be the intended recipient. Anyone who sees the image is a potential victim. If a court decides that the sender should have known that the image would upset anyone who sees it, the poster could face months in prison and thousands of dollars in fines.

Constitutional scholar Eugene Volokh recently wrote that the law doesn’t require that the picture be of the victim, and the government need not prove that the poster intended the image to be distressing. Volokh believes the bill is, “… pretty clearly unconstitutional.”

Another provision of the legislation lets law enforcement access the contents of your communications on social networking sites simply by offering “… specific and articulable facts…” suggesting that the information sought is “… relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” No warrant required.

Julian Sanchez — a privacy scholar at the Cato Institute — … Read More » Read More…

While nearly every organization has a social media policy today, most social media policies ignore the greatest business risk to their organization from social media: managers. The simple reality is that landmark law suits or sanction brought against employers in the past couple of years have resulted from the actions of a manager, not an employee. For example:

Earlier this year, the NLRB settled a case with American Medical Response, which the NLRB brought after the company fired an employee for disparaging remarks made in the employee’s personal social media account. In March 2010, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that companies do not have the right to access employee’s attorney-client email communications if accessed on a personal, password-protected e-mail account using the company’s computer system, even if accessed on a company computer. The ruling occurred after the company pulled the web-based emails from internal company storage, and tried to use them in a lawsuit that the employee brought against the employer. Those same boundaries apply to personal social media. In October 2009, 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 … Read More » Read More…

According to the National Labor Relations Board, companies can not discipline workers who post criticisms on social-networking sites.

The New York Times reports that the National Labor Relations Board agreed Monday to settle a case with a company that fired an employee after she posted disparaging remarks about a supervisor on her Facebook page from a home computer.

While her employer, American Medical Response, claimed that her statements did not qualify as protected activity, the National Labor Relations Board — for the first time — asserted that companies can not discipline workers who post criticisms on social-networking sites.

According to the NLRB, this employer will:

revise its “overly broad rules” to ensure that they do not improperly restrict employees from discussing wages, hours and working conditions with co-workers and others while not at work, and they will not discipline or discharge employees for engaging in such discussions.

This clarification by the NLRB will require a lot of companies to change their social media policies right away.

Chris Boudreaux helps large organizations develop and implement social media strategies and capabilities, including governance, measurement and operations.

His new book, The Most Powerful Brand on Earth, shows you how to transform teams, empower employees, integrate partners and mobilize … Read More » Read More…