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Entries in social media (14)

Monday

May102010

The social media election?

Monday, May 10, 2010 at 10:11PM

After last week's election results it seems that @nick_clegg may not have as much in common with @BarackObama as some of his supporters had hoped.

More on this later, but for now don't worry... I'm not planning to get political. I have read enough political commentary over the last few weeks and I don't feel the need to add to it.

Actually, I am interested in the role of social media in the campaign... in particular whether we have seen the first "social media election" as The Guardian and others predicted or whether Gordon McIntyre-Kemp has it right in his post The Next Election will be Socialised.

Twitter and Facebook have certainly been buzzing with debate and grassroots campaigns. Social media has been the story (Kerry McCarthy's ill-considered tweet about postal votes) or given it viral reach (such as Philippa Stroud's prayer sessions to 'cure' gay people).

There are some politicians who are established social media users like @tom_watson and (looking a bit closer to home) @leahfraser who kept on Tweeting through the campaign and after the count was announced.

However, most of this buzz is what I think of as "horizontal" social media (and yes, I know that could be misinterpreted!). What I mean by this is people talking about the election (debating, re-Tweeting media stories and blog posts) - rather than interacting directly with policy makers, candidates or party leaders (which I would label as "vertical" interaction).

When you start to look beyond the horizontal, the picture is quite different.

If you watched the election campaign unfold on Twitter you might have noticed the similarity I mentioned earlier between Nick Clegg and Barack Obama. Both of their Twitter accounts are "managed" (in Clegg's case) or "run" (in Obama's) by somebody else on their behalf.

Both accounts are genuine (Obama's is even a verified account) and totally transparent about the third party involvement (if you really want to outsource your tweets then you could learn a lot from their approach).

When you start to look at "vertical" social media activity from these accounts (and from @uklabour and @conservatives) it is pretty much a one way street.

In other words, the parties and many politicians treated social media as a broadcast medium. They realised that social media was an important channel to communicate with the electorate, but used it at a fairly rudimentary level.

We saw David Cameron on Mumsnet of course, but the leaders debates themselves were firmly TV based. Twitter Q&A sessions were few and far between.

If David Cameron does agree a coalition with the Liberal Democrats (at the time of writing he had been invited to form a government, but the coalition deal wasn't signed) then the accouncement isn't likely to come via a Tweet from Nick Clegg.

In fact, the best use of social media from someone close to a party leader was probably @SarahBrown10, who uses Twitter in a much more "social" way and has picked up over a million followers (a hell of a lot more than any of the official Twitter accounts).

This revolution, at least, was not Twittervised.

I'm not arguing that politicians should be tweeting from the campaign trail every five minutes and I don't think it is realistic to expect Nick Clegg to be live-blogging his ongoing discussions with the other parties.

However, I do believe this may be the last election where this relatively shallow involvement in social media will work for politicians (or maybe the second last, but I'm assuming for now that the next general election is in five years or so).

Twitter didn't even exist during the 2005 general election campaign, and Facebook still wasn't accessible to the general public. You can't call either of these "emerging technologies" any more, but I wouldn't like to even try to predict the reach of social media by 2015 (and what it will look like).

If the graph continues in anything like its current form, then expect to see social media to play a much more important role in 2015 (or thereabouts)... in a real "social media election".

Politicians won't have the option of hopping on the social bandwagon once Parliament is dissolved. There will be a divide between those who have built up their social networks and developed relationships with online constituents over the long term and those who still see social media as just another campaign tool.

My message to the candidates who ventured into social media for this election campaign? Don't stop now... if you carry on engaging, building up relationships and showing a little of what you really stand for it will stand you in good stead next time around.

If your Tweets stop once the returning officer announces the results, then don't expect to have much social media credibility in five years' time.

Social media law part two

Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 8:20PM

In my first social media law post I looked at social media clauses in legal agreements.

This time the topic is more specific:- due diligence on social media "assets".

Not everyone who reads this blog is a lawyer so let me explain what this actually means (if this is too basic for you then please skip the next couple of paragraphs!)

Due diligence is what lawyers and other professionals call the investigations that a buyer makes (or should make!) before buying a company or a business. Basically it is legalese for "kicking the tyres".

It will usually include financial due diligence (do the numbers stack up?) and legal issues (does the business have contracts in place, is it being sued?). For large or complex deals it will involve a whole raft of professionals looking at everything from pension scheme funding to market research.

Incidentally, it also gives rise to one of my least favourite manglings of the English language... the use of "to due diligence" as a verb. As in:

Bob. Get on the phone and tell the lawyers we need to due diligence the crap out of these contracts...

If you are guilty of this then please, please stop it right now!

This post is really about legal due diligence rather than the other kinds.

There are always hot topics in the field. When I started out as a corporate lawyer in 1999, the vogue was to include questions to ensure that a company's software and hardware were likely to survive the dreaded Millennium Bug (amazingly, I still sometimes see due diligence enquiries from law firms which include these).

Over the next couple of years I expect a similar rush to include due diligence on social media and Web 2.0 issues. I predict that a lot of these enquiries will be drafted by large law firms without any real grasp of how social media works or what it means... and I predict that they will be pretty lame.

Still, it is easy to criticise. What do I think buyers (or their lawyers) should be looking at?

As I wrote in my first social media law post, there is no special "social media law". Many legal issues and problems will be covered in standard due diligence enquiries anyway.

If the company has infringed someone's copyright or posted defamatory material on a blog then this should be picked up by the enquiries a prudent firm would always make.

There are a few specific legal issues which do need to be covered:-

what social media policy does the company have in place for employees?

is there a social media clause in any contracts where this is relevant?

does the company own the copyright in any social media content (in the same way as you might ask the question about content on its web site)?

are there any compliance issues arising from its social media use (e.g. a law firm offering legal advice over Twitter)?

If the business or company is an active user of social media then there will be other questions to ask. These actually fall somewhere between legal and operational due diligence (so it may not be the lawyers dealing with this)... they are more like "social media due diligence" in the true form:-

what services does the company use? What for and who produces the content or operates the account?

what platforms does the company use? Does it have control of all user accounts and passwords... how are these going to be handed over at completion without the risk of a disgruntled employee going "rogue"?

are there any key social media assets which are likely to be disputed? This could include LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook accounts which employees might claim are personal, rather than company, property.

does the company have an archive or record of all the updates which have been published? Does the buyer want to review these in detail?

is all valuable content (blogs etc.) securely backed up? There may be a bulletproof backup policy on in-house servers, but with an external blog hosted on wordpress.com or blogger. Have these posts been backed-up?

The scope will obviously vary depending on how heavily the company uses social media, but most businesses will merit some level of enquiry. Even if the lawyers don't carry out this due dilligence, they will need to understand it so they can incorporate any necessary warranties and other provisions into the sale contract.

How quickly will law firms will realise the importance of these social media assets to their clients?

I suspect that this may be another area where small firms have an advantage. They are more likely to be using social media effectively themselves (rather than just banning it) so it should be easier for them to understand the questions which need to be asked... rather than treating it as just another "Millenium Bug question".

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Tuesday

May042010

Follow-up or spam?

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 at 7:10PM

I am a member of a great networking group on the Wirral called Juice Networking. From tomorrow I will be presenting a five minute slot every fortnight covering social media, real world networking (and anything else which springs to mind).

This is an indefinite gig - or until they get sick of the sound of my voice - and I am posting a few of these "slices of knowledge" (as they are known) on this blog as I go along.

Tomorrow's slot is about something which is much too common: "follow-up" spam.

I have read and listened to a lot of "wisdom" about networking. One of the key points generally an exhortation to "always follow-up". That is, the initial meeting should be just the start of a relationship - not an end of itself.

I totally agree with this, but it so often goes wrong in the execution.

Does this sound familiar? An email lands in your inbox from someone you spent a couple of minutes chatting to at a networking event. It is a standard marketing pitch with your name added in at the top - probably sent to everyone on the list of delegates.

I get this all the time and to me it isn't follow-up... it's just more spam to clog up my inbox. It may not be advertising dodgy pharmaceutical products, but it is unsolicited mail sent indiscriminately and which I haven't asked for or subscribed to (which pretty much fits the definition of spam).

There may not be anything illegal or "wrong" about this approach, but it is likely to do two things. Firstly, the emails go straight in the trash... and secondly it kills off any relationship before it begins. Spam my inbox after our first meeting and you are going to have to work pretty hard to regain my trust or attention in the future.

To me, effective follow-up looks more like this:-

personal... it's from someone I remember meeting and it references what we spoke about
relevant... it is sent because there is a reason for us to meet again, talk further or keep in touch. You can't follow-up with everyone and you don't need to - if you don't think you can do anything for them then, really, what is the point?
constructive... as well as just a "nice to meet you" it has some more information or a link I asked for and suggests the next step in building the relationship
reliable... if you said at the meeting you were going to do something (pass on an introduction, send a leaflet or whatever) then please, please do it. Nothing is more likely to kill your chance of building a business relationship than failing to deliver right at the beginning

I have seen some great examples of how to follow-up on an initial meeting and most of them covered these four points. These are the emails (or calls or letters) which catch my attention and don't go in the trash. If you are trying to sell me something then this is probably the way to start going about it.

Social media can also be a great way of following up contacts. Twitter in particular allows you to become someone's follower where a follow-up email might be intrusive or "spammy". There is no compulsion for them to follow back so you are not taking up their time or attention in the same way as with an email.

If their tweets make it obvious that it is worth taking things further, then reply to them with an @message. Provided you are genuinely interested in joining the conversation (and not just broadcasting sales messages) then they will probably be happy to engage with you... build the relationship from there.

If you have any tips for giving good follow-up then please share them in the comments!

Social media law part one

Monday, April 26, 2010 at 7:47PM

What is social media law?

Many lawyers argue that there is no such thing. Other than specific legislation (like the Electronic Commerce Directive) the same laws of copyright, contract, defamation etc. apply to the Internet as in real life.

However, this depends on how you view social media. Is it simply a development of Internet technology? Or is it a paradigm shift, a completely new type of interaction which will eventually drive the evolution of a body of "social media law"?

I'm not saying which side I fall on quite yet, but this is the first of a series of posts in which I am going to look at how the law is adapting to social media.

Rather than writing about abstract theories, I will be looking at the ways my day to day practice is changing to incorporate social media and Web 2.0. In the last post I will round up with my views on how the law is likely to develop (and maybe even answer the paradigm shift question).

To start with, I am looking at something fairly simple: what I call the "social network clause".

This could be used in all kinds of commercial agreements, but a good example is franchise agreements.

Take a situation where you operate a chain of restaurants under the Taco Cottage brand and you want to expand into different cities by granting franchises to new operators.

As well as the usual provisions in your franchise agreement, it might be sensible to include a "social network clause" to set out how your franchisees are allowed (or encouraged!) to use social media to promote their Taco Cottage franchise businesses. This will be different in each case, but some basic things to think about are:-

Is the franchisee entitled to create and operate Twitter accounts, Facebook pages etc. using the franchise business name? Are you happy to see Taco Cottage Wolverhampton and Taco Cottage Shrewsbury on Twitter or do you want Twitter users to engage with your own @TacoCottage account?
Alternatively, should franchisees be obliged to use social media to promote their franchise business? If so, should they be required to feed back details of any successful initiatives to the franchisor for use by other franchisees?
Who will "own" these accounts and how will copyright in the updates and content provided be dealt with? (the Law Donut blog has an interesting post on the implications of this for employers, but similar issues apply in this kind of situation).
What social media policies should franchisees have in place for their employees?
What happens if the franchise is terminated (or sold)? Is there a provision for the social networking accounts to be transferred to a new operator or owner? (By the way, there are real practical issues with this if the login details are held by a franchisee... maybe a service like Hootsuite which allows team collaboration on your Twitter account, but under your control, would be useful).

Franchises are an obvious example, but the concept is just as relevant to dealerships and distributorships, operators of concessions in shopping malls and any other agreement where one party is promoting a business using elements of the other party's intellectual property rights and goodwill.

I have incorporated something like this into a number of contracts recently and I would suggest it to any client entering into this type of agreement.

Of course, if you are the client, and you are having this kind of agreement drafted, then ask your lawyer about including a suitable clause... if they look at you blankly then feel free to point them in the direction of this blog!

Coming up next time around:- social media in mergers and acquisitions.

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