Mile High Social Media Club Wrap-up
Thursday night, I was fortunate to be on a panel for the Mile High Social Media Club with local photographer Jerome Shaw and attorney Kristin Diamond. I had a great experience and the group, as always, was a great crowd. (I have been going to the MHSMC meetings for sometime now and the quality of individuals that attends is always a pleasure!).
Several of the issues raised I discussed on my blog about in the past few posts. However, several questions were asked that I have not posted about (or at least haven’t recently posted about) and a short discussion of them is in order.
The first question that was raised was about creating contests and other promotional events using the web. While it is important that anyone creating contests have a clear terms of entry that covers what rights the contest holder gets to the entries, when a third party is going to be used to host the material, the terms of use of the third party must also be clearly understood. With the advent of websites like Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook, more parties are using these mediums to host their contests and promotional events. However, by using these sites, the parties are not only agreeing to the terms of use of these sites for themselves, but potentially the contest entrants to. Therefore, when developing both the contest and the terms of service, it is important to make sure that the attorney developing the terms of services has been told that a third party is also going to be used.
The second question that was raised was about how to ensure that small companies have the correct procedure in place to stop information from being released by employees. Although I dealt with this in an earlier post, I thought revisiting this issue was a good idea. First, having an attorney help develop a communications policy doesn’t have to be expensive. Attorneys experienced in online and internet issues can integrate these policies into employment contracts and independent contractor agreements – both of which are probably documents that small companies should have created anyway (of course, small companies need to consult their attorneys to be sure that these documents are necessary). Attorneys experienced in this can also help companies draft policies and instruct management how to make sure the policies are followed. Although this may not be super cheap, it is a lot cheaper than having the company brand hurt by an unintentional post by an employee.
Again, I loved presenting to the MHSMC and thought the questions asked were great.
For the rest of the week, please look forward to a post on judges banning twitter in the courtroom and the Digital Economy bill pending in England.
