Social Media Legal Risks in Enterprise 2.0

In my previous blog post, I discussed some of the major benefits and value levers of implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools in Starbucks. Recently, companies realized that they must use social technologies to cope with the digital era and improve their performance which will eventually increase their profits. However, several concerns have arisen regarding the misuse of social media that should be taken into consideration before implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Firstly, to make things much easier, let’s talk about these legal risks within a context. Every company provides a customer with products or services. Therefore, I am going to examine InfoLawGroup as an example of potential legal risks in social technologies.

InfoLawGroup, which was established in October 2009, provides a wide range of legal services focused on information technology, privacy, data security, advertising and promotions, consumer protection matters, e-commerce and intellectual property.

Secondly, InfoLawGroup lawyers enable the firm to offer clients greatly increased efficiency in providing legal services. They have successfully served a diverse range of clients: from large Fortune 500 multinationals to small start-ups, ad agencies and technology service providers. InfoLawGroup currently using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and one of the Founding Partners of InfoLawGroup LLP claimed that “Facebookers and other social networkers often end up sharing a large amount of personal and professional information over time with friends”.

Being a heavy user of social media, there are hundreds of legal concerns that must pay attention to it. In this post, I would like to discuss three big legal risks in the InfoLawGroup:

Information Security Legal Risk

There are two main legal risks of security-related issues. To begin with, employees are accessing social media from company computers, or from their personal computers connected to company networks, malware and phishing. However, social engineering attacks could result in security breaches and legal liability. Secondly, potential confidential information leakage could result in an adverse business and legal impact when information is comprised by a third party.

Disparagement and Defamation

Social media environments provide a forum for defamatory statements to be made about individuals, and companies’ products and services. Employees may post comments that may not be fully accurate or true about an individual or a competitor’s products or services. This could lead to a potential lawsuit and liability. Furthermore, social media sites that allow comments may also involve such statements made by third parties over which the organization has no control.

Privacy

Social media provides a platform for an interactive communications between companies and their customers. In turn, companies seek to use this knowledge to sell their products and services back to these customers. Social media platforms enable gathering of information, including sensitive personal information, in ways that were unimaginable few years ago. Companies leveraging social media can gain access to this personal information which eventually raises privacy concerns that could increase legal risks.

How to address these Risks?

So how do companies mitigate social media legal risks? Social media experts advise organizations to create a social media policy (SMP) for their employees that clearly states guidelines and monitor what said about the organization and the business. Using Social Media Policy is one of the best ways to mitigate the legal risks as it is a useful way to set some ground rules for employees with regard to their online activities. It's also a reminder that the content that they post may not belong to them and may ultimately affect the organization negatively.

Here are some of the key elements and issues that should be addressed and identified for dealing with these risks:

 

• Loss of confidential information;
• Defamation;
• False statements or misleading and deceptive conduct;
• Reputation risk;

 

Additionally, as Malcolm Burrows demanded that, “Organisations should also ensure that those staff that are involved in social media in an official capacity are aware of the legal risks of participation so that they can respond appropriately when the time comes”. I feel that these risks can be appropriately managed through understanding, monitoring, and providing the guidance necessary to maximize its benefits to the organization by a strong enforcement of the social media policy.

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Starbucks "blue ocean" strategy

Starting as a single shop in Washington that specialized in high quality coffee to be the largest and the most well-known coffee shop all over the world. Starbucks experienced rapid growth in the early 1992, with wide range of locations around the United States, Japan and Singapore. Starbucks then began expanding its brand. In the beginning, it started offering Starbucks coffee on United Airlines flights and using their official website to offer people the option to purchase Starbucks coffee online. Starbucks also sold CDs in their retail stores to provide customer with more information about their products and different coffee beans they used in preparing their drinks. This strategy makes Starbucks to use minimal advertising and has grown on word of mouth and brand recognition.

 

 Their mission statement, from the company profile, is: “Our mission is to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” Their competitive advantage is the high quality coffee and products at reachable locations and reasonable prices, provided a community to share the coffee drinking experience.

Recently, as stated in The Social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies 2012 by McKinsey Global Institute, companies have started using social technologies to gain more customers, improve performance and eventually increase their profit margin. Starbucks realized that they must apply social technologies to compete with others and to create an effective relationship between their customers and the company. They added a crowd source process innovation called, “MyStarbucksIdea” in which customers can co-create/develop new products if they have any idea that Starbucks could apply in purchasing coffee beans or suggesting new coffee combination. The customers can submit idea, view others ideas and importantly follow up what happened to these ideas. To handle one of the biggest problem of crowd sourcing is to ask people to submit idea without any later response of “What happened to my idea?” Starbucks have established “Ideas in Action” to publish idea’s updates.

 

Additionally, social technologies increase collaboration, communication and interaction by entertaining people. They activated Gamification  which aims in adding a real time, competitive gaming element to any task. People gain points by submitting or even rating an idea. They display top ten point scorers in the “leaderboard” to encourage other people to communicate more in this community. Product innovations not only make the business potentially more profitable, but keep them far away against any competition.

My suggestions would be to create more customization by allowing customer to create new flavours and drinks above and beyond the options they currently have. This would incorporate with the other creation of online user experience. Users could go on to the online Starbucks interface and have complete control to create their own drink. Users could post their favourite drink combination and others could vote on it. Also involving the user experience could be in having mobile application, putting in drink orders, favourite drink and store finder to enhance the Starbucks brand in the new digital environment.

Overall Starbucks has maintained a competitive advantage since creating its original “blue ocean” strategy of bringing quality, bistro-style coffee choices to the masses. In order to stay current it will need to focus on its core competencies and create new value innovation by enhancing the customer experience by investing in online content and interactivity. Rather than creating more new products, I think their strength lies in their brand and by enhancing the connection to their loyal customers, they will separate themselves from others.

 

 

 

Now, I invite you to enjoy this coffee and feel free to share your thoughts :)

How can Web 2.0 tools assist my personal productivity?

Before discussing how Web 2.0 tools assist my personal productivity, I want to define the term “Web 2.0”. Web 2.0, as defined by Wikipedia, “describes web sites that use technology beyond the static pages of earlier web sites”. This allows users to interact and collaborate with each other as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to regular websites where people are constrained to just retrieving information.

There are many ways people can communicate and collaborate in a digital environment. For example, a collection of blogs enables a blogger to share their thoughts and insights about several topics in life and also allows the community to contribute and add comments or suggestions regarding that particular topic. In other words, it offers new effective modes of collaboration and group people in an efficient way.

 

Wikis are one of the web application tools that allow people to add, modify, or delete content in  collaboration with others. Google Docs is an amazing web-based office suite which allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. For more than 6 years, I was using Google Docs to share documents with my colleagues as  an effective and easy way to update content simultaneously, and more accurately between all of us. Later on, as a tutor in an IS department, I activated these tools, in addition to twitter and blogs, to allow students to discuss various issues related to the unit such as specific software problem or unclear topics as well as share their information with other students for their benefit too. I had an excellent experience because students enjoyed this digital environment since they benefited quickly and easily and without any need to impose a structure or rules to collaborate.

As concluded from The Social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies 2012report, by McKinsey Global Institute, Web 2.0 offers several benefits to  individuals themselves and within their organizations. It facilitates engaging with customers on social media and monitoring social media conversations to create customer insights and market intelligence. It enables sharing, publishing and consuming content within a group to increase workers skill level by communication and collaboration.

People also can crowd source things through technology to get help in solving problems. RocketHub is one such interesting online crowdfunding platform. Users from around the world including musicians, scientists, game developers, filmmakers and fashion designers post fundraising campaigns to RocketHub to raise funds and awareness for projects and endeavours. RocketHub enables Direct-to-Fan social media-based outreach and fundraising. When posting a campaign, users choose a campaign deadline, target funding-goal, and offer “perks” in exchange for contributions. Broadly, RocketHub shares similarities with platforms such as Kickstarter, Sellaband, and Pledgemusic.

 

And here is  an interesting video I would like to share about how a company can find the right talent from 1734 applicants, if job interviews are all the same.

 

It must be noted that Web 2.0 technologies, however, can effect productivity in a negative manner. It does consume time and might decrease productivity if  it is not used in the right way. Additionally, some cultural factors might interact with using these technologies. For instance, employee might not do their assigned jobs and spending time in blogging or commenting on others blogs which eventually effects their productivity.

Have you ever used one of the Web 2.0 tools to assist in your personal productivity? And how did it increase, or even decrease your productivity?

Why blogging?

Having a successful blog is not an easy job that anyone can achieve.

As a beginner blogger, I established, in my mind, an approach to follow to be a good blogger. However, no blogging strategy is necessarily better than another because anything can work if we just stick to it.

Before blogging, I believe I should conduct research so I provide readers with a concise easy-to-consume version of any topic.

I intended to share topics in my speciality field which is Information Systems as well as some interesting daily events that might help the community. As Rebecca Gill, WordPress Addict and Technomommy, claimed “I'm a firm believer that real life makes the best blog posts”. For instance, examples from my personal experience might interest others, or answer questions others are looking to figure out.

Providing readers with credible information and staying up to date in hot topics is another way to create very useful content as well as a wide range of readers. Monitoring social media discussions such as hashtags in Twitter will be a good repository for useful updated content to be shared with others.

Another strategy I would really like to follow is to write less but more of a higher quality. If someone publishes on a daily basis, they eventually run out of interesting topics. As a first time blogger, I will post different topics related to Enterprise 2.0 on a weekly basis. I will also include other multimedia tools such as pictures, audio and video in addition to text to provide readers with new content.

A good approach is also to communicate with others by adding comments in others’ blogs and add an element of social interaction. After gaining attention, I will make sure I proceed with higher value content to retain my followers and turn one time readers into subscribers. Even though measuring blogging success is different from measuring marketing campaign success, the number of subscribers and comments indicate the success of some blogs.

 

 

 

One of the most interesting blogs I really recommend is Cloud Computing blog which concerns many strategic viewpoints on cloud computing and social media. It is owned by Chirag Mehta, a SAP employee who analyses startups and shares insightful wisdom on how cloud services impact IT.

 

 

Do you think these strategies are enough for having a good blog?