Week5-Legal Risk with Social Media for Business

In this post, we will have a brief summary for legal risk of social media application for business. First of all, we will introduce some concepts and foundation knowledge. Then major risks for enterprise organization with social media will be discussed. Finally, we will discuss protections for business when we apply social and enterprise 2.0 technologies in business.

If you have read my previous posts, you will find that risks and crisis are unavoidable components coming with your application of web 2.0 technology in business, while social media on the internet will still affect your reputation even you ignore them. For assurance of positive effects and application of web 2.0, crisis management is necessary for each organization in current world.

The crisis management cycle contains three parts which are:

1. Social networking skills and strategies

2. Legal risk identification

3. Policy and contract development

With successful risk management, risks business confronts are capable to be opportunities and bring positive effects, whereas invalid method may result in worse situation.

Now, before we start to discuss legal foundations, there are some general rules we need to know. First, old world legal principles still affects with enterprises who apply web 2.0 technology at work place. Employees are responsible for when they did both online and not, which means employee must obey the lawful commands or directions of an employer. For instance, when employee signs up an account for social media, they have to read privacy policy and agree all conditions to sign up. Second, a rough truth is it may be possible to ban social media at work, but difficult to control utilization of social media, for instance Facebook, of employees after working hours, but their contract cannot be terminated for their activities after work. Third, a typical situation happened is Employers may be vicariously liable for the actions of their employees. In addition, both side of employment relationship must aware that employers own the work output of employees.

As can be seen, various risks for organizations can be identified when enterprise 2.0 is applied, such as confidential information risk, wrongful dismissal risk, reputation risk, technology risk, etc. Sometimes, statutory risk for copyright and privacy is also significant. Besides these risks we mentioned above, third part risks may also lead to serious disasters. Details and instances of several of these risks will be discussed within next post.

For protection purpose, some businesses block and ban some or all social media applications at workplace. Numbers of enterprises attempt to monitor their employees when they use social media tools. Some managers adapt more positive methods, for example document a social media marketing strategy, engage social media monitoring service, enforce employee training for effective engage, and efforts on how to protect from viral and malware threats.