THE ABSOLUTE POWER

We have all seen how Twitter provided minute by minute update about what was happening in Mumbai on 26/11 or became the only source of information for the global media giants during the IRAN election drama. Well, we are all aware about the absolute power social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc.  offers to the people. And, as we all know not many people can handle the power. Power corrupts!

YOUR BRAND IS NO LONGER YOURS

The consumers have become the co-creators and co-owners of the brands. They don’t just buy your products or services, but they speak and share. They share about good experiences, bad customer care, upload a nasty video of a faulty music system with a step by step demo of why it is not working, send out positive tweets about your tasty tomato curry to their Tweetpals and so on. To cut the long story short, they participate in conversations which involve your brands too.

THE DANGER ZONE

The real danger for brands come from fake identities created on the social media platforms. Unofficial pages, profiles, twitter accounts are being created by many destroyers – may be your competitors, very annoyed consumers or even just brand haters with no real work. While, many of the social media platforms have realised this phenomena and have taken some steps to curb it, but the very nature of social media model can’t put a full stop to such activities.

YOUR TOOLKIT

What you need is thorough understanding of the social media and their T&Cs. However fine the print is, it is important for your legal department to go through it carefully and understand the implications involved with it for your organisation or your brand.  We recently created a brand experience on various social media platforms. We had our legal department and the CTO of the client organization working together to read through all the documents, disclaimers and so on in order to make sure that we are on safe grounds. Here are quick points to remember…

Always consult your legal department before you do anything with social media

Define company policies, guidelines for individual bloggers from your company or people who would create and participate on social media platform representing your company

Check what offline rules apply to online world – IPR, Copyright etc.

Consumer safety guidelines should be drawn upon to protect consumer interests

Have clear moderation policies, monitoring & control mechanisms in place

Your social media policies is yours only and you cannot adopt any other company’s policy – your business objectives are definitely different than the other company

Observe the law of the land and if there are no clear guidelines – observe global standards

I guess this is good enough to begin with. Let’s talk…

Take care.