On Saturday March 14th at 3:30pm I will be presenting a Core Conversation “A Hard Sell? Social Media & Your Boss” at SXSW in Austin with Shashi B. I am one of our lawyers at Network Solutions and Shashi is the Social Media Swami there. Steve Fisher and Jill Foster will also be at SXSW. Looking forward to meeting everyone there. Please swing by for the panel session. It should be fun!
This is the fifth post in the series of blog posts with the session as a theme.
So you are in intense discussions with various people at the company and you are just about to get approval. You are feeling good. Its finally going to happen. Social media paradise is within your grasp that you can just feel it. Than that guy in the back of the room that doubles as the male equivalent of Debbie Downer says, but Legal will never go for this.
Wrong!
Here is one part of the path to getting legal approval from most legal departments. Suggest to the lawyers that the company has a set of social media guidelines that everyone from the company must comply when they participate in and engage the community.
These guidelines do not have to be 30 pages long. They can be as simple as a 1-2 page document that has some Do’s and Don’ts. Many of the guidelines are frankly common sense approaches that can be used across the company in many forms of public communication and public relations.
The guidelines should at the very least address:
- Defamation (business and personal)
- Intellectual Property (Copyright/Trademark)
- Addressing topics that are in litigation
- Trade Secret Disclosure
- Privacy Issues
- If a pubic company – SEC and disclosure issues
I will be discusing guidelines like this in more detail on Saturday afternoon with Shashi B. Hope you can join us at SXSW.
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