I'm often asked to draft corporate policies or suggest best practices for social media interactions between employees and customers. In this column, I'll explore such policies and practices and suggest that many policies are far more complicated than need be and actually create unintended liabilities that could be easily avoided.
Social media activities by employees create any number of concerns for companies managing their workforce — employees' discourse with one another, employees interjecting themselves in a company's marketing communications with consumers, and employees' online chats and postings unrelated to their jobs — but that may be associated with their employer.
As brand owners spend more than $24 billion annually on advertising online, it's clear that online activities, including social media, are key tactical tools in virtually every major corporation's marketing arsenal. It's also clear that consumers of every age are comfortable with online purchasing, despite reported privacy concerns.
At the same time, social media has become an amazing vehicle for social debate and change. What's unfolding in the Middle East with the fall of Egypt and Tunisia is only the beginning. There are at least eleven other totalitarian regimes believed to be targets for change.
All of this online activity has caught the global attention of billions of people. It's how we communicate, whether through the Internet or mobile media. We log on, we post, and we Tweet. Peers, more than any other source of information, are motivating not just individual consumers, but entire nations.
With all this change comes an increasingly unpredictable marketplace. Make a mistake and countless consumers will attack your executives, brands, and companies. Try to suppress online speech, and millions of citizens of the Internet Nation will bring a government down.
To Continue Reading: Click Here
-----------------------------------------
Source: law.com
By: Douglas J. Wood
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment