Social media - normalised, crisis or chaos?
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Abstract

While social media platforms are increasingly being used in routine aspects of corporate life, many companies do not understand the legal obligations regarding the status of tweets, posts or blogs. The situation seems as similarly unmanageable as email did 10 years ago.

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If ever a company needed effective crisis management now it’s the owner of the cruise ships Costa Concordia and Costa Allegra. It’s facing both the aftermath of a tragically avoidable shipwreck and the embarrassment of needing a tow from a passing fishing boat while its thousand-plus passengers sweltered on the deck.

When crisis strikes, companies need to deploy every damage limitation tool at their disposal and that includes social networking. But as social media use extends even to the serving of legal documents, many enterprises admit to still being “in chaos” when it comes to managing them effectively.

By 2015, three quarters of companies that have business continuity management programmes will be including public social media services in their crisis communications strategies, predicts the analyst Gartner. They may sometimes be the only available means of contacting personnel, assisting stakeholders and reassuring the public.

But, Gartner warns, if you wait till a crisis comes before learning how to use social media, you’re likely to do more harm than good. Above all, you mustn’t let “digital friendships” take precedence over the organisation’s official spokesperson; protecting your reputation and effectiveness during stressful times mustn’t become a battle for control.

Crisis management aside, though, social media seem to be entering some of the more routine aspects of corporate life. The Daily Telegraph reported a recent ruling in the High Court in London, for example, that a company may serve legal documents through Facebook if it’s not sure of the address of a defendant.

It may not lead to a deluge of attempts to serve proceedings this way, says Claire McCracken of the law firm Pinsent Masons. But, she adds, the ruling “demonstrates that the courts are acknowledging the fact that social media platforms are now used as an important means of communication and that they consider such platforms as a ‘non-traditional method/place of service’” under the Civil Procedure Rules.

More evidence that the law is still evolving when it comes to social media comes from the information management firm Iron Mountain, which urges companies to make sure they understand the latest legal obligations regarding the status of tweets, posts or blogs in every country where they do business. And to judge from its research findings, it’s pretty clear that many companies don’t at the moment.

Although three quarters of United Kingdom respondents regard social media communications as formal business records, only around half are aware that they carry legal liability for the content. What’s more, a third describe their management of social media as “chaotic” and “unmanaged”.

Social media, in fact, are causing as much corporate angst as email did a decade ago, Iron Mountain suggests. What goes around comes around, it seems.

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