Risk and Liability in Business Use of Social Media
The other day, a client told me they wanted to beef up their social media presence and asked me for a rough idea of the business risk they faced engaging in social media. I’ve pulled some of the points from my response for this post.
Commitment and Teamwork are a Must
Linkedin and Facebook in particular are not things you can set up and forget – they require a lot of consistent effort and attention, and they move rather quickly. In small to medium sized businesses, there may not even be a staff dedicated to marketing let alone social media, so it is very important to get management and overall organizational commitment to using social media. In smaller organizations, the same people doing the work are the ones engaging in social media. Sales people, account managers, operations managers – these are the people who will be doing the communicating, so you have to be a little careful how far you allow communication to go.
Decide on a Level of Service to Deliver
Especially with Facebook, you would have to decide exactly what level of customer service you are willing to offer in that medium (because people will ask all sorts of questions), and push any topics beyond that level off to another medium (like email or phone or better yet, a third party). When I have reached the threshold for the level of service we are willing to deliver via the blog or other social media, I will refer people to a primary source, an expert in our organization or a third party (attorney, government official, CPA, etc.).
Legislative Aspects of Liability
Your liability for other people’s comments on your blog, website or social media profile is pretty low. At Andreini & Company, we put together a presentation on Social Media Liability that I’d be happy to share with anyone who requests it in the comments. It gives an overview of the types of problems you may run into and some rough guidelines for managing the risk. Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code (47 USC § 230) states that a website owner is not liable for information posted on their site by someone else (unless that someone is an employee, partner or otherwise connected to the organization). That means that if you list other people’s tweets, blog posts or comments on your site, you are not liable if their comments are libelous, defamatory, infringe on copyrights, etc. Likewise if you reference or quote other sources you are probably OK unless you’ve edited the content so as to change the meaning of the external source.
Watch Out for Opinion Stated as Fact
Even with these protections, if you will have employees posting on social media outlets as part of their jobs (or on your website, blog, etc.), what they say can get you into trouble if they say something libelous, defamatory, infringe on copyrights, etc. When posting information yourselves, stick to the facts and stay away from opinion stated as fact. Opinion is protected by the first ammendment, but opinion stated as fact is not. For example:
Pure opinion:
“I dislike product X made by XYZ company more than any other product in the industry because of A, B and C.”
Opinion stated as fact (you better have a study to cite or other backup if you’re going to say this):
“Product X made by XYZ has the slowest performance of any similar product in the industry.”
There is a good discussion of the topic here: https://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal/liability/230
Record retention…
Personally, and for our business, I would stay away from doing anything over social media that could be construed as being part of the normal business operations. In our case, I would not accept quoting information, offer specific account service or customer service or any other service that we would normally document – I would take that communication into another medium, like email or phone. If someone has a question about their specific account in a blog comment, I do not post that comment to our blog, but rather have the account team respond directly via email. You should definitely consult an attorney on operations specific retention requirements and risk for your company.
And…my disclaimer for this blog post:
Information provided on this blog is not intended to be exhaustive nor should any discussion or opinions be construed as legal advice. Readers should contact legal counsel or an insurance professional directly for appropriate advice.
All material copyright Mark Centoni 2012, and cannot reproduced in any form without written consent.
6 Powerful Blogging Statistics – Business blogging captures more traffic and more business
- At August 15, 2011
- By Mark Centoni
- In Business Blogging
0
Hubspot does a good job putting out inbound marketing information. Specific to blogging, I found the statistics in a couple of their publications astounding. Hubspot makes a good case when they say:
The more you blog, the more pages Google has to index, and the more inbound links you’re likely to have. The more pages and inbound links you have, the higher you rank on search engines like Google—thus the greater amount of traffic to your website.
- 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog
- Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic
- Companies that Blog have 434% more indexed pages that show up in search
- Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links than those who do not
- B2B companies that blog get 67% more leads per month
- B2C companies that blog get 88% more leads per month
There are 3,000,000 searches on Google everyday. The more quality content you have, the better chance you can capture some of those searches. How do you get more quality content on your website? Blog.
Sources:
The Andreini & Company Blog is live
- At June 27, 2011
- By Mark Centoni
- In Day Job, Wordpress
- 0
Just to toot my own horn a little, I’ve been working on setting up a blog for Andreini & Company, my employer, for the last few months, and it’s officially live to the world today (though we’ve been using it for some experimental campaigns for the past month or so). The objective of the blog is to bolster our largely static website with more fluid content to better demonstrate our expertise, build our overall website traffic, directly develop leads and contribute easy to understand business insurance information and tips to the web community at large.
Business Insurance and Risk Management are not traditionally accessible topics. Because they are closely tied to legislation and contracts, legalease is often a barrier to understanding the underlying concepts. In its simplest form, the blog is a place for us, at Andreini & Company, to discuss Insurance and Risk Management in plain language. That’s the highfalutin, idealistic goal. The business goal is that it gives us more content to talk about and share through many different channels. Business blogging is nothing new to the world, but it is new to us. And I’m kinda proud of it.
If you have a minute, check out the blog. I’d be happy to hear feedback from web or marketing professionals.
Easy Contact Form 7 Conversion Tracking in Google Analytics
- At June 21, 2011
- By Mark Centoni
- In Event Tracking, Goals, Google Analytics, Wordpress
- 0
Contact Form 7 is a nice, flexible form plugin for WordPress that allows you to create multiple forms and put them pretty much anywhere on your site (page content, posts, sidebar widgets). By default, Contact Form 7 does not redirect users to a confirmation page when a form is filled out. Instead, it uses AJAX to display the confirmation message directly inside the form element. That makes URL tracking in Google Analytics difficult because there is no URL to track in Google Analytics (GA). Luckily, Contact Form 7 has an innocuously named but powerful interface called Additional Settings (all the way at the bottom of your Contact Admin area in the WP Admin of your site). From the name, it’s hard to tell what this area can be used for, but we’ll paste some simple Javascript there to begin tracking form submissions.
The process has two steps:
- Add GA tracking code to your form in the Additional Settings area.
- Set up a Goal in GA to collect your form submission information.
Step 1
Paste GA tracking code into the Additional Settings area of the Contact Form 7 Admin in your WP Admin.
The Code
on_sent_ok: "_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/your-goal-definition/submission.html']);"
on_sent_ok
The hook built into Contact Form 7 triggers a firing of the GA page tracking code when the submission is successful.
Since there is no actual page that we’re redirecting users to upon submission of the form, the URL the tracking code is fictitious. Replace “your-goal-definition” in the tracking code with whatever you’d like to see in GA and it will show up as the URL visited.
Save your form.
Step 2
Set up a Goal in GA to track your fictitious URL. From your profile in GA, click Edit next to the site for which you want to set up the Goal, then click Add Goal next to the Goal Set you want to add the Goal to (Set 1 is a good place to start if you don’t have any Goals set up yet).
- Give your goal a name to identify it in reports.
- Select URL Destination as your Goal Type.
- Leave the default Match Type at Head Match.
- Adjust Goal Value and add Funnels as needed – for more on this, here’s a good overview of GA Goals and Funnels from SixRevisions
- Save Goal.
That’s it. GA will track all submissions of your form as Goal conversions and you will be able to see conversion rates and track fun things like value or funnels with GA’s built in Goal Tracking tools.
How to track events with Google Analytics and JQuery
Event Tracking in Google Analytics allows you to easily track, count and analyze interactions on your site
Adding a snippet of code to onclick attributes of links allows you to give your events categories, actions and labels to easily group them, count them and analyze them in Google Analytics. It can be cumbersome to tag each link in a page individually with all of the proper data. With a little forethought on the types of interactions you will be tracking and a few lines of javascript using jQuery, you can apply event tagging code automatically simply by giving the link an appropriate class.
Before you begin:
- Think about the categories of interactions that you’ll want to track on each page (i.e. internal links, external links, affiliate links, ad links, etc.). These will correspond to the classes you’ll add to the anchor tags.
- Determine the actions that each interaction has (click, play – for video or audio, change, etc.). For example, affiliate links will be clicked, so the action that goes along with an affiliate link, in all likelihood, is click.
An example of the anatomy of event tracking code as given in the Google Analytics Event Tracker Guide:
<a href="#" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Play', 'Baby\'s First Birthday']);">Play</a>
For our purposes, we’ll stick with tracking clicks of external affiliate links. All of these links will have the same category (external-affiliate-links) and action (click) but the labels will vary to describe where the link is going. We’ll grab the title attribute of the anchor tag and make it our label.
The markup for our sample external affiliate links looks like this:
<p><a class="external-affiliate-links" title="label1" href="#">This link has been given google event tracking.</a></p> <p><a class="external-affiliate-links" title="label2" href="#">This link has been given google event tracking.</a></p> <p><a class="external-affiliate-links" title="label3" href="#">This link has been given google event tracking.</a></p> <p><a class="external-affiliate-links" title="label4" href="#">This link has been given google event tracking.</a></p>
Our jQuery code will run when the page is loaded, so we’ll start with
$(document).ready(function() {
//our code will go here
});
Then use .each() to loop through each of the links of the class .external-affiliate-links (feel free to come up with better class naming conventions)
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.external-affiliate-links').each(function() {
//get title attributes and add onclick attributes
});
});
We’ll grab the value of the title attributes to use as labels
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.external-affiliate-links').each(function() {
//get title attributes
var label = $(this).attr('title');
});
});
And finally, add the label to the Google event tracking code and slap it in the onclick attribute
$(document).ready(function() {
$('.external-affiliate-links').each(function() {
//get title attributes
var label = $(this).attr('title');
//add label to the tracking code
var ga_evt_track = "_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Click', '" + label + "']);";
//add tracking code to the onclick attribute
$(this).attr('onclick', ga_evt_track);
});
});
Our quick and dirty code to add tracking to each outgoing affiliate link is done. Now, whenever we create an affiliate link on our site, we just give it the class .external-affiliate-links and a title. The onclick code will be handled automatically.
