Archive for category Best Practices

A July 2009 research study by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law found that 81% of senior management, marketing and human resources executives view social media as a valuable tool to enhance relationships with customers and build their company’s brand. That’s the good part. Here’s the challenge: the same amount, 81%, perceives social media as a corporate security risk. There’s a natural balance. You want to use social media to enhance your brand and customer relationships. Who’s managing the associated risk? Your new best friend – your in-house counsel.

Before joining the 360 Digital Influence team, I worked on customer outreach Web 2.0 platforms for a large financial institution. As the study correctly suggests, our success was inversely proportional to our corporate security risk. The more reach we achieved, the more our in-house counsel panicked. With a background in law, I was uniquely qualified to take verbal beatings for our compliance failures and debate (argue) the merits of our outreach efforts. It wasn’t that much fun. To lessen the unpleasantness, I developed some best practices to improve our relationship with in-house counsel and improve the likelihood of our social media campaigns seeing the light of day.

I’ll expand each one in the coming weeks, but here they are in brief:

1. Work with counsel to develop an overarching social media operations plan. Have an offsite and create timelines for review processes, content guidelines, and expectations. Doing this together enables buy-in from both sides and you’ll also start to learn some of the legal issues that keep them up at night (so you can proactively try to avoid them).

2. Put yourself in their shoes. Lawyers are doing their job. Take pains to understand their point of view and explain yours. They don’t know who Guy Kawasaki is and are more focused on violating CAN-SPAM legislation than the reward you might receive from sending him a personalized email.

3. Involve lawyers early in the process of any specific social media campaign. They’ll want to review everything anyway, so save yourself revisions by telling them what you want to do and ask them if they foresee any issues. Keep them updated on changes that inevitably take place during the creative process. Get their sign off in writing early and you’ll avoid setbacks.

4. Don’t sneak anything by them. The old adage, “do now and ask for permission later” only applies to loved ones. They don’t love you and will show you as much in increased surveillance for the foreseeable future.

5. Be nice. Make sure to include them in a congratulatory email to the team on a successful campaign. They have stressful jobs and have the double indignity of feeling like the bad guy all the time. Let them know they’re appreciated.

These 5 suggestions made my life easier, but every situation is different. What interesting ways have you learned to work with your legal team.