Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: linkedin

  • Inflating titles, inflated apirations

    Inflating titles, inflated apirations

    This story first appeared in Smart Company on 19 April 2012.

    “She listed her job on LinkedIn as my ghostwriter,” reflected the journalist about his publishing business’ Gen-Y staff member.

    The journalist’s lament reflects an unexpected corporate risk in social media; that of employees giving themselves grandiose and sometimes damaging job profiles.

    Over the last 20 years, title inflation has been rife in the business world as corporations and government agencies doled out grandiose titles to soothe the egos of fragile management egos.

    So it isn’t surprising that many of us succumb to the temptation to give ourselves a grand title online.

    In the journo’s case a young graduate working as an editor in his publishing business listed herself as his ghostwriter, risking a huge dent to his credibility among other the lizards at the pub or the Quill Awards.

    That business journalist is not alone, in the connected economy what would have been a quaint title on a business card or nameplate is now being advertised to the world.

    Making matters worse, we now have tools like LinkedIn and other social media sites to check out a business’ background and who are the key contacts in an organisation.

    So what your staff call themselves is now important. It can confuse customers, cause internal staff problems (“how come he’s an Executive Group General Manager?”), damage business reputations and quite often put an unexpected workload on a relatively junior employee.

    In your social media policy – which is now essential in any business that employs staff – you need to clarify what titles your people can bestow upon themselves.

    As well as making this clear to new staff, a regular web search on your business that includes all of the popular social media sites should be a regular task.

    Just as economic inflation can hurt your business, so too can uncontrolled title inflation. Watch it isn’t affecting your operations.

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  • You hold us harmless

    You hold us harmless

    Social media site Pinterest was recently caught in one of the ongoing quandaries of social media – the ownership of content.

    The subject is tricky; social media sites rely on a vibrant community of users posting news and interesting things for their online friends.

    Unfortunately many of things social media users post are someone else’s property, so almost every service has a boilerplate legal indemnity term like Pinterest’s.

    You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold Cold Brew Labs, its officers, directors, employees and agents, harmless from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including, without limitation, reasonable legal and accounting fees, arising out of or in any way connected with (i) your access to or use of the Site, Application, Services or Site Content, (ii) your Member Content, or (iii) your violation of these Terms.

    Facebook have similar terms (clause 15.1) as do LinkedIn (clause 2.E) and Tumblr (clause 15). Interestingly, Google’s master terms of service only holds businesses liable for the company’s legal costs, not individuals.

    Boilerplate terms like these are necessary to provide at least an illusion of legal protections for investors – those venture capital investors, greater fool buyers or punters jumping into the latest hot technology stock offering need a fig leaf that covers the real risk of being sued for copyright infringement by one of their users.

    The risk in these terms shouldn’t be understated; by agreeing to them a user assumes the liability of any costs the service incurs from the user’s posts. Those costs don’t have to be a successful lawsuit against the service, it could be something as minor as responding to a lawyer’s nastygram or DMCA takedown notice.

    Of course, none of the major social media platforms have any intention of using these indemnity terms; they know that the first time they go after a user all trust in the service will evaporate and their business collapse.

    Somewhere among the thousands of social media services though there is going to be one that will pull this stunt. Strapped for cash and slapped with an outrageous claim for copyright damages, the company’s board will settle then send out their own demands to the users responsible.

    Those “responsible” users – probably white, middle class folk sitting in somewhere in the US Midwest, South East England or North Island of New Zealand – will be baffled by the legal demand that requires them to file a defense somewhere obscure in California or Texas and will go to their lawyer friends.

    When the lawyers tell them what it means their next step will be to their local news outlet.

    The moment the story of a middle class person facing losing all their assets hits the wires is the moment the entire social media business model starts to wobble.

    In many ways what the social media sites are trying to do is offset risk.

    Risk though is like toothpaste. Squeeze the tube in one place and the pressure moves elsewhere.

    By laying off a real risk by using legal terms the social media sites create new, even bigger risks elsewhere in their business.

    The dumb thing is these terms really don’t protect the services anyway – it’s unlikely the typical social media user will have anything like the assets to cover the costs of a major copyright action by a rich, determined plaintiff.

    It’s going to be interesting to see how many services still have these indemnity clauses in 12 months.

    For the industry’s sake, the big players will need to have ditched these terms before that first dumb attempt to claim damages from users hits the wires.

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  • The social maze

    The social maze

    Towards the end of 2011 we saw a surge of stories about companies and employees fighting over the ownership of corporate social media accounts like LinkedIn contacts and Twitter feeds.

    For the social media community this is encouraging as it shows that businesses are beginning understand there the value in online networks. It also illustrates the risks for both businesses and employees when these tools aren’t properly understood in the workplace.

    The employer’s risks

    As social media sites are one of ways businesses communicate with the public, managers have to understand these services are an asset too important to be left to the intern or youngest staff member in the office.

    Should that intern move on – possibly at the next college semester – the business may find they are locked out of the account or it is even deleted.

    Business pages and accounts should be set up in the name of senior people in the organisation and, where possible, administration should be shared by the relevant unit in the organisation (customer support, marketing or whatever).

    The nominal owner and administrators should understand that the account is the property of the business and all posts on it will be work related and not personal.

    When one of the administrators or owners leave the organisation, login details should be handed over and passwords need to be changed. Where possible, the ownership should be changed to another employee – this is one of the current problems with Google+ accounts at the moment.

    Employers need to understand that the professional contacts individuals make during the course of their work isn’t their property, so trying to claim the personal LinkedIn contacts and Twitter followers of an employee’s private account probably will not be successful.

    Similarly social media services like LinkedIn are not Customer Relationship Management programs (CRMs) and using them that way, as a company called Edcomm did, will almost certainly end up with problems and a possible dispute.

    Traps for employees

    When given a work social media account to maintain, it’s best to consider it as being like your work email – it’s best to use it for business related purposes only and you’ll have to give it up when you leave the organisation.

    If you’re being held out as a representative of the business, as we see in the Phonedog_Noah dispute over a business Twitter account, then it’s best to set up a private account for your own use and not use the business account after leaving the organisation, even if they don’t ask for it when you leave.

    On sites like LinkedIn and Facebook you should change your employment status as soon as you leave an organisation to make it clear you’re no longer working there. If you’ve left on bad terms, resist the temptation to insult your former employer when you change your details.

    Staff using social media have to be aware that can be held accountable in the workplace for things they do on their personal online accounts; sexual harassment, abusing customers and workplace bullying through a Facebook or Twitter account can all result in disciplinary action.

    In many ways the disputes we’re seeing on social media services reflect what we’ve seen in many other fields over the years – the ownership of intellectual property, professional contacts and even access to websites have all been thoroughly covered by the courts over the years and there’s little in these disagreements that would surprise a good lawyer.

    With all business disputes though, it’s best to resolve them before lawyers and writs start being involved. Clearly defining and understanding what is expected of both employers and staff can save a lot of cost and stress.

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  • Social media’s greatest enemy

    Social media’s greatest enemy

    Last week Google launched their business Pages function for Google+, which required a business owner to type in almost identical information to the parallel Google Places service.

    In the same week Facebook turned off RSS feeds into their status updates, meaning that new pages added to a website now have to be manually entered into Facebook. Tumblr did the same some time ago.

    Across the social media industry, the various services are asking users to manually enter updates and details into each platform under the belief that unique user generated content will increase the value of their sites.

    That’s all very good for the sites but for those using several services it’s becoming a tiresome chore.

    One of the biggest barriers to social media adoption – particularly among time pressed small business owners – is the time involved in maintaining these different services. With the exception of Twitter, most of the services are trying to increase people’s time on their platforms.

    For social media services the key measures of how much time users spend on the site is becoming a game of diminishing returns, people have only so much time in the day or so much inclination to spend a large chunk of their free time online.

    As the burden of maintaining a digital footprint increases and the value proposition becomes less compelling, particularly as the privacy costs becomes more apparent, more people are finding it all too hard.

    Social media services are going to have to show some value for the investment in time and the privacy costs incurred by users, it may well be that many just don’t offer a good enough deal.

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  • Is the social media business model dying?

    Is the social media business model dying?

    Is the social media business model dead?

    The frenzied rush to release new features such as Facebook’s latest changes, along with Google’s updates to their Plus platform, may be the first indication the big social media business model is broken.

    Driving the adoption of social media services has been the value they add to people’s lives; MySpace was a great place to share interests like bands and music, Facebook’s is to hear what was happening with their families and friends, LinkedIn is for displaying our professional background and Twitter keeps track on what’s happening in the world.

    Now the social media services want to be something else, Facebook wants to become “a platform for human storytelling” where you’ll share your story with friends and friends of friends (not to mention the friends of your mad cousin in Milwaukee) while Google+ wants to become an “identity service”.

    The fundamental problem for social media services is their sky high valuations require them squeezing more information and value out of time poor users by adding the features on other platforms; so Facebook tries to become Twitter while Google+ desperately tries to ape Facebook and Quora.

    Adopting other services’ features is not necessarily what the users want or need; you may be happy to follow a Reuters or New York Times journalist on Twitter for breaking news but you, and them, are probably not particularly keen on being Facebook friends or professionally associated on LinkedIn.

    If it turns out we don’t want to share a timeline of our lives with the entire world but just know how our relatives or old school friends in another city are doing, then the underpinnings of the social media giants value may not be worth the billions of dollars we currently believe.

    This isn’t to say social media services themselves aren’t going away, it could just be that the grandiose dreams of the online tycoons where they become an identity service or a mini-Internet are just a classic case of overreach.

    For Google and Salesforce, whose core businesses aren’t in social media, this could be merely an expensive distraction, but for those businesses like Facebook it could be that Myspace’s failure was the indicator that making money out of people’s friendships isn’t quite the money maker some people think.

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