I gave a speech to about 200 real-estate lawyers from all over B.C. last week on the use of social media in their practices, and some of the legal consequences of its misuse – by them or their clients.
Alerting attendees to the good, the bad and the ugly about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and even LinkedIn, and what can go wrong when they don’t keep their eyes on the ball, I said social media was a minefield, where even the smallest mistake can result in horrendous damage to a company’s online reputation.
The resounding message I heard from the group was this: “I have to be on it because my competitors are on it, and I have to be on it because my clients expect me to be on it. But I hate it.”
Here are a three takeaways to help you hate it less, and to understand it more, so that if an online crisis occurs, you’re better able to react to it.
First, as I’ve said before, many of the problems businesses encounter using social media are created by employees and contractors of the company. Do you have provisions within your employment agreements that allow you to fire-for-cause employees who trash your valuable brand or slag your management team or even their co-workers? In 2009, two bored employees from a Domino’s Pizza franchise in North Carolina filmed themselves doing some rather disgusting things with cheese and pasta destined for a customer and idiotically posted the video to YouTube. They were fired, of course, convicted of a criminal offence, and the franchisee lost his Domino’s franchise.
But nothing compared to the millions of dollars spent on lawyers, crisis managers and marketers brought in to deal with the repercussions of the video, and the additional millions of dollars in lost sales arising from customers who couldn’t bring themselves to return to Domino’s.
If the franchisee, as part of its employment agreement with its employees, had a social media policy in place that effectively said “use of YouTube, Facebook or other social media platforms that disparage the brand or any employee will result in immediate termination,” do you think the employees in question would have videotaped their exploits and posted it for millions of people to see?
Or might they have realized “… I could be fired for this” and stopped?
I like to think you can “fix stupid” if people know there are consequences for improper social-media use, but we’ll never know in this case. There was no such policy in place.
So as a New Year’s resolution, if you’re a small business with employees, you should create policies for social-media use by employees, making it clear what kind of conduct disparages the brand and will result in termination.
In order to make sure your policies are being complied with, you should monitor your brand’s name and trademark with either a commercial service or a free service such as Google Alerts to see what people – especially your employees – are saying about you online.
The second takeaway is the ability to turn public-relations problems into successes, without having to hire lawyers. There’s a great story I always tell about the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC). Said one person on Twitter who made a claim: “Picking up my car later today from Kirmac … finally! Oh, and screw you ICBC.”
Shortly after the Tweet was posted, a representative from ICBC tweeted back to him, and said “Hi [name withheld] it seems you're unhappy with us. Anything I can do to help?” A bit shocked that ICBC saw his tweet, the person replied: “ICBC for real? … LOL, it’s all good, nothing can really be done now.”
