In addition to monitoring what customers were saying about ICBC, the corporation turned a consumer gripe into a PR coup. Note that ICBC did not threaten to call in its lawyers to deal with a customer complaint. It was a PR issue, not a legal one, and one must not confuse the two.
Horizon Realty of Chicago did, and it found out the hard way what happens when someone exercises the right to free speech when the company launched a legal action against one of its former tenants for tweeting about a mould problem in an apartment. “Who said sleeping in a mouldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon Realty thinks it’s okay,” said a disgruntled tenant, upset that the problem wasn’t being remedied.
Horizon sued for $50,000, but the public backlash and outrage against it for using the court system to silence and intimidate a legitimate complainant was seen as heavy handed. So using lawyers to deal with your social media problems isn’t always the best course of action. It can backfire.
Here’s the third takeaway. What if you find, like the owners of Domino’s Pizza did, that your brand is being disparaged on YouTube or Facebook? The key is to get the content down so that millions of people aren’t seeing it. But how do you do it fast, especially if you’re a small company without a huge legal budget and you can’t readily afford to get injunctions against those two social media giants in the U.S.?
Go into the “terms of use” for Facebook and YouTube and you’ll find there is a complaint procedure in place for those with intellectual property rights (such as copyright or trademark) when those rights are infringed by unauthorized parties in unauthorized ways. Facebook, YouTube and others, not wanting to waste their own time and legal dollars defending injunction applications they might actually lose, have these procedures in place to “take down” content that violates someone’s intellectual property rights.
So if there are pizza boxes in the video that display your trademarks, or the hat worn by the employee doing nasty things with the cheese has copyrighted design elements, this will often give complainants the grounds they need to have Facebook or YouTube actually take down the content between 24 hours and 36 hours after your notice. Registered trademark numbers and an explanation of your complaint are essential – for example, “we own trademark XYZ. The user on URL page ABC is not authorized to use the mark and is infringing.”
In any event, these three takeaways, just in time for the holidays, might make your social-media use easier, and allow you to hate it less in 2012.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Tony Wilson practices franchising, licensing and intellectual property law at Boughton Law Corp. in Vancouver, and he is an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University. His newest book, Manage Your Online Reputation, was recently published. His column appears every other Tuesday on the Report on Small Business website.
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