Today business has to prepare itself for the biggest shift in society since the post-war era. Sounds dramatic! It is!

We are now living in a world where information is at our fingertips literally and there is little control of what we can discuss, find out about and decide upon. We can lobby government directly, we can organically build huge armies of activists for or against organisations, and we can demand change because we now have the ability to do so through a wired connected world.

This has a huge impact on business, many whom are still operating within archaic rules that have not caught up with social aspects of the web. Take ASIC and financial institutions, if a bank posts a comment back to an article on a blog page, is it advertising and promotion, therefore requires a product disclaimer? I know legal teams with opposing views on this.

What about an employee’s personal social media habits and the opportunity to bring a business in disrepute, there have been various reports going back to January 2005, in the first case of its kind in the UK, blogger Joe Gordon from Edinburgh was been sacked by his employer Waterstone’s for a few mildly negative comments he made about his job on his satirical blog, The Woolamaloo Gazette to recently Virgin Atlantic sacking 13 employees for their activity on Facebook.

The Challenge for Corporate Affairs and Legal in Business

• No alignment between the online environment and the business with little or no governance procedures

• The organisation is ineffective to understand the new economic order

• There are financial and reputational risks associated with consumer generated content and social media which business is failing to grasp until it is too late due to a lack of understanding

• Issues with managing conflicts of interest between legal and corporate affairs and marketing in the new social channel

• Understanding privacy requirements

• Inadequate business continuity regarding online reputation management

Solutions

•  First understand what social media is, by using it. Various consultants offer training workshops and getting training across your overall organisation is critical. The training should be live and experiential not death by power point

• Do research so you can understand what is going online in social media channels in respect of your brand and reputation.  Again there are specialists who offer these services.
• Adopt a single online governance approach, which includes a single view and approach of the key governance activities.

• Produce a risk policy plan for marketing teams to provide best practice guidelines when they deploy social media strategies

• Produce a HR policy on staff using social media channels personally to minimise risk to their affecting your reputation as an employee

• Continually monitor the social media channels and adapt your policies accordingly.

• Key points for a clear paper on social media best practice guidelines and risk should address:

Legal parameters

Liability

Accuracy

Confidentiality

Endorsements

Set a Code of Ethics

Processes and Procedure for Social Media

Processes and Procedure for Post-back comments

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