One example from last year, was an employee who called in to work and explained that she was suffering from a migraine and that she would not be coming into work that day. Shortly after, the employee boasted on Facebook that she was throwing a sickie and wanted to see what friends were around to meet for a drink a bit later in the day. With our help, the employee was invited to a disciplinary hearing to explain herself. The employee was subsequently dismissed for gross misconduct. During the disciplinary meeting, the employee complained that the company had clearly infringed her human rights because her Facebook privacy settings meant that only her friends could see her posts and not friends of friends or everyone. For her, this meant that the company must have breached her privacy settings in some way. Unfortunately for the employee, she had forgotten that her manager was one of her Facebook friends who received a notification by email of the employee’s updated status and promptly called us.

This is not the first time we have been asked to assist with sorting out a problem that an employee has caused through posting inappropriate messages or photos on Facebook. A few years ago, we were asked to advise in a situation where an employee had posted sexually graphic photos of herself and then complained that colleagues were sharing these photos around the office (and presumably elsewhere) forgetting that some of those colleagues were also Facebook friends. Nevertheless, the employer had to step in to stop the gossip and teasing and help the employee get over what must have felt like a walk of shame.

The employment tribunals have also reported on the problems of social media in Preece v JD Wetherspoon plc,. The tribunal case that found it was fair to dismiss an employee who had made inappropriate comments on Facebook about two customers. What seems to have been helpful in this case was that the employee made the comments while at work, using the company’s computer and her comments were in breach of the employer’s e-mail and Internet policy, which specifically referred to use of media such as Facebook while at work. The disciplinary procedure also listed as gross misconduct, acts that affect employee or customer relations or brought the company’s name into disrepute.

So is there any expectation of privacy for your Facebook profile? The employment appeal tribunal (EAT) decision in Pay v Lancashire Probation Service suggests that the answer is no. In this case, the EAT held that a probation officer who specialised in the treatment of sex offenders could not rely on the Human Rights Act in support of his unfair dismissal claim when he was dismissed for his involvement in sadomasochistic activities publicised on the Internet. The claimant had put photographs of himself engaged in such acts in the public domain, and they therefore fell outside the protection of Article 8.

Employees often confuse personal and private. Quite simply, if you decide to publicise your personal life on the net, your personal life is no longer your private life.
For employers, all these cases highlight the importance and usefulness of having a properly drafted policy regarding the use of social media that includes explanations about proper and improper use. It is also helpful to explain to employees that it is inappropriate to use social media like Facebook or Twitter to express frustration in the workplace.

A sensible policy will include:

• Employee use of IT resources generally
• Confidentiality and how this applies to social media tools
• Intellectual property and how this applies to social media tools
• Prohibition on harassment and bullying
• Prohibition on discrimination
• Prohibition on negative comments about the company, clients and colleagues
• You may also want to ensure that there is a prohibition on negative comments about the competition
• A reminder that when you use social media tools such as Facebook, you are making public what you are doing, ‘public’ being the operative word

It is easy to get very excited about prohibitions on what can and can’t be said, but take some time to think about the restrictions you really need to impose on use. If you are overly restrictive, you may be creating a problem for yourself because employees do not take the policy seriously.
If you are going to introduce a social media policy, it will be helpful also to discuss it with your employees and make sure that your managers understand how to use it effectively.
If you would like help with drafting a social media policy or have come across similar cases, please let us know.

This blog post does not constitute legal advice on any particular situation you may have, but if you have any concerns and would like to ask us specific questions, please call either Amanda Galashan or Julie Calleux at EmployEase on 0845 123 3741, or email us at info at employease dot co dot uk

Related articles

• Social media and the law: forecasted developments in 2012 (econsultancy.com)
• Dismissal for Posting Vulgar Comments About a Colleague on Facebook was Fair (floydgrahamsolicitors.com)
• LinkedIn case highlights social media legal conundrum (premierlinedirect.co.uk)

If you ask someone else to post on your behalf you’re asking them to understand your business and to be able to speak for it. Now that might just work if they were only handling your account but if they take on outsourced social media they will be running a whole load of accounts. Be realistic – can they really understand all these businesses? If they understand the sector you’re in they may well be posting for your competitors as well as for you. If they avoid that conundrum then they will be trying to get their heads around several different sectors – plumbing followed by financial services followed by hairdressing. If your financial advisor came along and offered to install central heating whilst she was there would you go for it?

And what does your phantom poster do with responses? Do they reply or do they ignore them? What about problems, complaints? If they have to refer them to you how long will it take before there is a response?

Anyway, being broad minded I decided to take a look at the website of the company offering these services. They are charging $15 a month for 5 hours posting – that should be the first alarm going off – I don’t know about the US but that is so far below minimum wage as to be a joke so either they are having you on about the number of hours that they are doing or they are employing slave labour – would you want either to front your business? Next I took a look at some of the accounts they are posting to – and that is exactly what they are doing. Marketing tweets, the occasional retweet (other accounts of theirs?) and the odd inspirational quote thrown in for good measure. No engagement, no relationship building.

Now before you say it, I know that there are businesses out there who manage social media for their clients and who offer a professional service but I still hold to my view that it is unlikely that an external business can really build the social engagement that you should be looking to bring to your organisation. Anything less than that just isn’t social.

So before you leap into (or even if you’re already doing it) ask yourself the following questions:

1. What do I want to achieve?

Starting without a clear objective is asking for trouble. A bit like walking into a shop without any idea of what you want to buy (or even if the shop sells it). So write down all the things that you would like to achieve using social media, as you work through the rest of the questions you’ll probably find you can cross a few of these off your list. The aim is to end up with a clear set of objectives.

2. Will social media help my business?

This is the point when you start to do some serious research. When we start working with a new social media client we work through the following areas:

• What is the demographic of your current customer base?
• What are they doing on social media at the moment? Where will we find them?
• Are you looking to break into a new demographic? Are they using social media? And where will we find them?
• What is the rest of your sector (large and small) doing on social media now?
• What are they doing well? Can we learn from them?
• What are they doing badly? Can we avoid their mistakes?

At the end of this exercise you should have a clearer idea of whether social media is a viable option for your business at the moment. It might be something you want to park for the time being, alternatively you will raring to go!

3. How will social media fit into my existing marketing strategy?

Social media marketing should not be something that sits on its own. You need to plan how you will integrate it into your overall marketing strategy – online and offline.

4. Which tools to start with?

Unless you have a lot of resources at your fingertips then it’s probably a good idea to start slowly. Your earlier research will have indicated to you which is likely to be the best option for your business – pick the number one choice and start with that. It might be Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn or YouTube or blogging or something else. You can always add other tools later – for now get the best out of one of them.

5. Who is going to ‘do’ it?

Yes, someone is going to need to spend some time on this. Some take the option of outsourcing but I think it is almost impossible to speak on behalf of another business so whilst we can help with research, support, training and management we do encourage our clients to actually ‘do’ their own social media.

When you’ve decided who (one or more people) is going to manage your social media on a day-to-day basis, you then need to consider the resources they need to support them. This will include training/coaching, content resources and the key one – time. You don’t necessarily need massive amounts of time but there should be some part of each day allocated to posting, monitoring and responding if this is going to work.

6. How long do I give it?

Social media is not a quick fix. It takes time and effort to build relationships so you need to give it a reasonable amount of time before deciding whether it remains as a key part of your marketing strategy. But how long is reasonable? I would expect to start to see some results within three months but would expect it to be at least six months before making major decisions on whether to keep investing time and resources so don’t expect miracles within a week.

7. How do I know if it’s worked?

This is where we meet metrics. When you set your objectives you should also decide how you are going to determine success. If you’re looking for increased web traffic then you need to have analytic software  in your website to track where traffic comes from. If you have no idea how much web traffic you’re getting at the moment (there are a frightening number of businesses in that position) then you’ll have no idea whether your Tweeting or Facebooking brought you any increase so make sure that the metrics you plan to use are in place from the start.

So will it all work now?

If you answer the seven questions I can’t guarantee that social media will work for your business however you will go into it with a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you’re going to measure success.

Why not join us on Facebook? Or chat with us on Twitter?

It’s pretty well known that employers these days will check to see what’s in the public domain about a potential employee which is a good enough reason to be careful what you post and ensure that your privacy settings are set appropriately. But pushing further and wanting to either login to your account, shoulder surf whilst you are logged in or alternatively asking you to ‘friend’ HR is wrong whichever way you look at it. They might as well invite you into their house to have a look around their cupboards and drawers.

But have you considered that it might even cause a problem for the business? There is a resignation letter doing the rounds online which points out that knowing too much can put the organisation in a very difficult position. Once you’ve found out something about someone you can’t un-know it and, as the examples in the letter illustrate, you could now be faced with some awkward choices.

And suppose, for a minute, that you persuade your employee to ‘friend’ HR.  Your organisation now has access to their friends personal details. People who probably don’t know you, who don’t work for you and have absolutely no desire for you to go nosing into their personal life. You might also want to consider what you’re going to do if you find out something that you don’t like (assuming at this point you don’t work for the law enforcement services and even if you do, you’ve probably gained access to information in a way that may not be admissible in court).

Maybe now is a good time to review your HR policy as regards background checks and make sure that whilst being diligent you are also staying on the right side of respecting people’s privacy.

And if someone insists that you let them have access suggest they reciprocate by handing over the keys to their online banking – after all, you’ll want to be sure that you’re working for a company that can afford to pay you at the end of the month…!

Related articles

• Should the King Have your Social Media Passwords? (dontbitetheapple.net)
• Employers Ask to Poke Through Facebook Profiles (thoughtsofmytwenties.com)
• Recruitment trend we hate: Asking for Facebook passwords during the interview (venturebeat.com)

It was when the conversation moved to social media metrics and scale that I started to wonder if he really understood social media.

“Most brands communities are between 100 and 200,000, frankly, unless you are going to get to a million you should stick {the money} in TV. There’s absolutely no point in having a little Facebook community bubbling away. You buy your way to scale.”

I don’t think so. Marketing has moved on a long way from the days when it was only about finding the big audience. Back in the day we only had one commercial TV channel so if you advertised there you took a huge chunk of the population. Now we have endless channels, the ability to time shift and to skip the ads. TV is now incredibly segmented. Add to that the segmentation in social media – Facebook. Twitter, YouTube, blogs and you can’t assume that the only places worth being are where you have huge numbers.

And if numbers are his key metric what about engagement? Social media is not push marketing (although you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise if you looked at some of the big brands Facebook pages). It is about engagement, talking, listening, responding and the brands that do that will win in the end. I can go along and ‘Like’ any of Diageo’s pages and never visit again. Or even take any notice of their posts . But a business that uses their page to engage – that’s a different matter. One of my favourite examples at the moment is Waitrose – visit their Facebook page and check out the ‘Recent posts by others’ and see real engagement. And how does that make me feel about their brand? I feel good!

But I’m amazed at how many haven’t been updated. OK, so we’ve got a week left (Facebook will change any Pages that haven’t been manually changed on the 30th March) and maybe some are planning to do the upgrades in the next week. However I just wonder how many will be switched over without any thought as to how things have changed.

It’s not just a question of getting a new cover image either (although with that amount of screen real estate you’d be mad not to use it). There are many other changes too. If you have custom landing pages for visitors who haven’t ‘liked’ your page they won’t be functioning. They will still be there but you cannot now put anything between you and the visitor before they visit your Page. If you have other apps they will need some updating – the space available is now greater and you don’t really want something squashed into less space than it could be.

There are new features like Messaging – have you thought about how you’re going to use that? And what about Milestones, Highlighted posts and Pinned posts? We’ve put together a brief overview of the changes which you can download - Facebook Timeline for Pages - and there are some links at the bottom of this post which I hope you’ll find useful. Whatever you do, don’t do nothing!

Timeline IS going to make a difference with the way you interact with your followers. Whether this is in a good way or a bad way is up to you.

Related articles

• Holy Timeline! New Features for Marketers, Part 1 (socialmediatoday.com)
• Ready or Not, Facebook Timeline for Pages is Coming Next Week (onesocialmedia.com)

Now, getting links to your website can be a very good thing as long as the site linking to you is reputable. But it can be easy to be fooled by an email which appears to be targeted to your website offering a link exchange. It all sounds pretty reasonable and when they throw in the fact that they found your site through the reverse google pagerank algorithm it can sound even more convincing. Except that there is no such thing.

The sites that offer these link exchanges are generally the sort that you wouldn’t want to be connected to in a million years. If they put a link to your site on their site it will most likely be hidden away on a page called ‘links’ whilst they will no doubt want prime position on your website. In many cases these sites will already have a bad reputation with Google and other search engines and this will rub off on your site if you link to them. You could end up being blacklisted by the search engines you are hoping to impress.

For links to be of any benefit there must be relevancy. If your business is plumbing then it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense linking to a website that sells hats. Unless of course they are waterproof hats to protect you from that leaking pipe…!

So if you get an email from someone you’ve never heard of, saying that they found you this way (or any other!) and offering to exchange links, you know what to do… run!

There are several things that we can learn from this unfortunate episode.

Learn how it works

If you’re going to have a Facebook account at least take the time to find out how it works and lock down your privacy settings if you plan to say anything that could be miscontrued or that you don’t want the world to read. Understand how sharing works on Facebook. If you want to find out what others see (and you’re using the new Facebook profile) then you can check what your profile looks like to someone who has no connections to you, you can also see what it looks like to a particular friend. Instructions here. If you haven’t moved over to the new profile you can get the same information here.

Think carefully about who your friends are…

Come on lady, you’re a primary school teacher, you’re 50 years old – are your pupils really your friends? Should you be friending pupils, ex pupils on Facebook? Probably not. Should you be getting some friends of your own age? Probably.

Whatever job you do, you should think carefully about who you add as a friend. Is it a great idea to let your boss know that you are a hard drinking, coke sniffing, lap dancer? Or that you spend your weekends knitting tea cosies? Is it really clever to let your young pupils know that you’re a wild party animal? Great role model you are then!

If in doubt – don’t. It’s much easier not to overshare than to try and recover from it afterwards.

Don’t believe everything that an expert tells you…

Hadyn Blackey, from the University of Glamorgan has been “been working with schools to inform teachers on how to offer children guidance on how to safeguard their privacy online”. His suggestion is “”I would recommend that, in terms of pupils, you set up a separate account.”

Do that and you’ve gone against Facebook’s Terms of Service (4.2 You will not create more than one personal profile) and you risk having all your accounts closed down.

So, what do you think?

What are your views on this? Was Elizabeth Scarlett wrong? Misguided? Or was it all OK? Share your views in the comments section.

In this niche we had to offer added value. Early on, we resolved to identify the date of first performance of a particular opera in Scotland and build up an appropriate database. As Scottish Opera, for example, announce their annual programme, we search archives for the date of first performance to place on our website, and a note about notable past performances. We promote the site using both traditional approaches and new media. We distribute leaflets, well targeted, both face to face and through relevant publications. In terms of new media, we are developing our skills in search engine optimisation, social media (Facebook and Twitter) – and Wikipedia!

Everyone I am sure knows Wikipedia as its entries pop up at the top of Google searches. This online encyclopaedia has grown in quality and expertise, and is now far more highly regarded. This online resource allows one to submit subject entries and to ‘tweak’ existing entries. Subject areas are reviewed and policed by volunteers with expertise. This is not the place to explain the rules in detail, but the entries one puts up are subject to editing by peers and indeed rejection. Any entry requires to be grounded in fact, and buttressed by evidence in the form of references.

Image via Wikipedia

My brother Peter always planned to embed some of our findings in Wikipedia, but a letter on 11 April 2011 in the Guardian from a group of historians brought home to him to us the its potential. The historians argued that sharing their knowledge in Wikipedia and embedding references in Wikipedia allowed users access to high quality research, clearly written and downloadable. Once some dozens of appropriate links were added, the traffic to their online database of papers had increased significantly.

Peter therefore added relevant material inserting a number of references in existing articles. For an example, look up the biography of the Scottish singer Ian Wallace, and the references to the Ledlanet Nights Festival. Here and elsewhere we used as supporting evidence our website, newspaper reviews and some Ledlanet programmes. Our insertions were seemingly lightly edited – an alteration deleting the detail of roles, and subsituting “and other minor roles”. Irritatingly, one of the titles inserted was changed to one that was factually wrong!

What have the results been? Given that we have not yet had the time to add as many links as we’d like, we’ve had a steady drip feed of visitors – 145 in the few weeks since the first link was put in. But for a niche service such as the one we offer, it is quality that counts. Page views are high (5.8), the time visitors stay on our site is high (13.5minutes) and the bounce rate is low (26%). Clearly this situation is win-win. We are adding new material and making a contribution to the range and quality of Wikipedia entries, and in return get some high quality traffic. This experiment has encouraged us to continue as we build the quantity and quality of our content.

We appreciate that using Wikipedia will not suit everyone, but it works for us.

Real world convergence

This is a big one to watch and it will happen in a number of different ways. KLM are introducing a new way to select your seat on their flights – by using social media profiles to find people you know or would like to know. The idea has certainly generated them quite a bit of publicity so far with some fairly mixed reactions. Does this constitute a form of stalking or are we going to hear of amazing deals that were done at 35,000 feet? Check out the video for more details and let us know what you think.

Social media convergence isn’t that new – back in 2010 Coca-Cola used RFID bracelets to let visitors to the Coca-Cola Village Amusement Park check into Facebook but I think that 2012 will see an increase in the way businesses connect with their customers via social media in the real world.

Location based check-in (using smartphone and social media apps) has been an interesting part of this story – there were predictions earlier this year that Facebook Places would kill off FourSquare but this hasn’t happened and Places hasn’t had quite the profile we might have expected. However Facebook have now purchased Gowalla so it will be interesting to see what happens next year.

Key to location based services is getting business to join in. There isn’t a lot of point having people ‘check-in’ at your restaurant or shop if you haven’t claimed the location. As smartphones continue to proliferate and accessing social media sites on the move becomes easier we’ll see the clever businesses  take advantage of this opportunity to engage with their customers.

Google+ Business Pages

Google launched their third attempt at social media this year – Google+. When it was first announced it was clearly just for individuals and they actively stopped businesses taking part. Then, in November this year, Google announced Google+ pages for business.

So will Google’s latest try at social media succeed? Well, it’s possible that businesses may prefer to be on Google+ rather than Facebook, especially if they are B2B rather than B2C. Business to business has always been tough on Facebook so this may work in Google’s favour. The problem may be persuading many businesses, especially smaller ones which don’t have the same resources, that they need to add another channel to their marketing. LinkedIn are continuing to add functionality to their Company pages and there will be a lot of organisations that will prefer to spend the time on a network that they are already use and are familiar with.

However I don’t think it would be smart to write off an organisation the size of Google just yet. They have the money and the reach to keep at this until it does work. But will it be Google+? I’m not convinced yet.

Social Media will cease to be seen as a fad

Yes, there are still people out there who think that social media is a passing phase and one day soon it will all disappear. It won’t. What will happen is that social media will stop being something that is talked about as though it was on an island of its own. It will be stitched into business and marketing strategy. A key tool in the marketing box, it will be integrated into all the other forms of marketing.

Social media will become normal.

Just so long as it doesn’t stop being fun!