Social Media Training Helps Companies Manage Risk

Companies are learning that there are many valuable business uses of social media. They're also learning that improper use of these media can pose significant business risks. While networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs are gaining rapid acceptance as marketing tools, they're still new enough that employees don't always understand what is expected of them, and employers don't always know how to set boundaries. Training your employees on the responsible use of social media can help prevent some of the common missteps that can damage your company's reputation and help reduce the risk of litigation.

Your company may already be marketing and promoting its business on social-media sites. If it is, then you may be familiar with some of the legal and compliance issues that social media use can trigger. Even if your online presence does not extend to social media sites, you should understand these issues, and so should your employees. Here are two examples of issues raised by social-media activities:

Defamation
When a former employee of a college in the UK posted that she had been "criminally overworked and obscenely underpaid" while teaching at the college, the director of studies at the college added a comment to her post explaining the UK defamation law and asking that the teacher edit her comments so they would not breach the law. In another instance, a Facebook user posted that a coworker was married but that her husband —a lawyer — was unfaithful and had had several affairs. The lawyer's wife threatened to sue for defamation. If either of these posts had been made on a company-sponsored Facebook page, the company could have been threatened with litigation.

Wage-and-Hour Issues
Have you hired hourly employees to post videos to your YouTube channel, update your Facebook status and "tweet" on Twitter? If your hourly employees "follow" the company and receive tweets on their personal Twitter accounts after work, can they clock overtime hours for reading the tweets? Employers should create a social media policy that addresses these issues and should ensure that their employees receive training on the policy. Employees need to know what the company considers acceptable and unacceptable before they can be held accountable for complying with social media guidelines.

Categories: General Business Compliance
Tags: Social Media, Wage and Hour, Defamation, Compliance Training