It’s impossible not to be involved in social media. Why?

• You can be drawn in when you don’t want to be.
• New media allows people to speak out.
• People in your organisation use it.
• The law says so.

Let’s look at these in turn.

You can be drawn in

There are many ways, good and bad, that you can be impacted by social media even if you don’t want to be.

Because the media focuses on what happens when things go wrong, so will I, not to reinforce the scaremongering but to talk through what we’ve learned from these crises and how they can be prevented and managed, and to demonstrate that, whether you like it or not, you’re part of the socially connected world.

But a caveat. Most of the time what is going on online is business as usual. Yes there are the horror stories of the Facebook party that turned wild, or trolls tweet-bombing insults or bullies who extend their offensive behaviour into the online world. Most of the time, though, people go about their daily business, forming strategic and serendipitous connections with others who share their interests and values and for whom the name of the game is reciprocity. And because of what we’ve learned, when the offenders do come out, social media platforms have ways of dealing with them.

That said, let’s look at what happens when things go wrong. We’ll start with one of the worst things that could happen to a person — being falsely accused of being a paedophile. This happened in Britain in November 2012, and here’s the backstory.

A normally reputable BBC current affairs program, Newsnight, aired an exposé of alleged abuse in children’s homes in North Wales in the 1970s and 1980s, during which one victim, Steve Messham, claimed that one of his abusers was a Tory politician from the Thatcher era.

These allegations were publicised before Newsnight went to air, including on Twitter. Responding to a question from a Twitter follower as to who the politician was, one of the Newsnight team let out Lord McAlpine’s name. It was immediately retweeted and spread like wildfire across the web.

However, the allegations were false. The Prime Minister ordered an inquiry into the matter and the Director-General of the BBC, George Entwistle, resigned the following day.

Lord McAlpine subsequently sued the BBC and threatened to sue anyone on Twitter who had shared the false accusation, data that is very easy to obtain. Had he followed through, the case would have had the largest number of defendants in British legal history. Instead, McAlpine focused on those influencers who retweeted or shared the story and whose large Twitter followings helped give the incident global legs.

Although there were many other issues raised by the case, including those of fact checking and right of reply, the real awakening was in the social media sphere. The internet is not the Wild West. The case reinforced the point that people on social media are ‘publishers’ responsible for their views. As to how being online impacts behaviour and how best to deal with it, these questions are still evolving.

There is, however, one simple lesson to draw from the McAlpine case, which is not to engage in malicious gossip, particularly in a public space. This is not radically different from how people are expected to behave offline. Know when to engage and when to step back; and remember, social media is not a coffee shop, it’s a publication.

New media allows people to speak out

Few media-related incidents are as dramatic or damaging as this one was. But new media does allow ordinary people to comment publicly on events and to circulate their views on a scale previously restricted to the powerfully entrenched traditional media outlets.

For example, in 2012 radio talk show host Alan Jones proposed that then Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s father had died of shame at her behaviour (not surprisingly, there is a wiki detailing this affair). Although Jones later apologised, many were unconvinced by the gesture. Online views around the issue quickly coalesced, and advertisers were pressured to withdraw their support from the show. Many did, and announced that decision online, predominantly on their Twitter accounts. These included Mercedes-Benz Hornsby, Woolworths, Freedom Furniture, Lexus of Parramatta, Coles, ING, Bing Lee, Mazda, 7-Eleven, Sydney Symphony Orchestra and HCF Health Insurance. This ‘boycott’ cost 2GB up to $80 000 per day.

Quite inadvertently, brands had become associated with the values espoused by Jones and sought to distance themselves from his actions. The broadcaster later claimed this was cyberbullying, although it did not label Jones’s own comments in the same way. Those companies that did not withdraw advertising came under pressure to explain themselves. None of these businesses had woken up that morning expecting to have to justify their marketing approach to millions of people on prime-time television on the evening news, but this is the speed and impact of connected communication.

Only a year earlier advertisers pulled their support for a breakfast show after host Kyle Sandilands made misogynist comments. Once again, online communities used new media to express their outrage at what many believed was an abuse of media power.

People in your organisation use it

This sort of reputational entanglement can also work in reverse. People all around the world as well as within your organisation use social media. Regardless of whether that’s professional or personal, you need to know how to handle it.

Sometimes this happens at the most senior levels. American congressman Anthony Weiner was forced to resign in 2011 after sending sexually explicit material via Twitter to a 21-year-old female college student. When he tried to return to politics in 2013 as a mayoral candidate for New York City he was alleged to have continued his sexting behaviour under the alias ‘Carlos Danger’.

In Australia the A-League soccer team Melbourne Victory, the Melbourne Rebels rugby union team and the AFL club Melbourne Demons all dumped a major sponsor, Energy Watch, after its CEO, Ben Pollis, posted a string of racist, sexist and bigoted messages on his personal but publicly visible Facebook page. Pollis’s targets ranged from Aborigines and Asians to various religious groups, women and Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Although he claimed these were private jokes, they were of course public and as the owner of the Facebook page Pollis was responsible for the comments. The boards of the various sports clubs met immediately and very quickly terminated their sponsorships with the business, as did other businesses such as Momentum Energy and TruEnergy who were using the energy broker.

These were not trivial decisions. For the Demons alone, the deal was worth around $6 million over three years. The energy companies also lost money as a result of these resolutions, and of course the CEO was forced to resign, the company went into receivership and employees lost their entitlements.

The personal and professional are intertwined when views are expressed in public forums. A man in Canada lost his job when he used Twitter to try to score marijuana. He tweeted: ‘Any dealers in Vaughan wanna make a 20sac chop? Come to Keele/Langstaff Mr. Lube, need a spliff’. Police who saw the tweet shared it with the added comment, ‘Awesome! Can we come too?’ The tweet quickly received 3710 retweets and 2456 ‘favourites’. Because there was no crime, no charges were laid but police did inform his employer, who subsequently fired him.

White House staffer Jofi Joseph also lost his job when it was revealed he was running an anonymous Twitter account, @natsecwonk, that criticised top officials in the foreign policy and national security communities.

The stories go on, although hopefully we are learning. But the common lesson of all of them is simple: social media is a publishing platform; when you use it, you are a publisher and you’re responsible for what you say. And whether you like it or not, because so many people use it, social media affects you in some way.

Which brings us to the law.

The law says so

Although there is increasing awareness about social media, and companies realise that they need to be where their customers are, there is still a view that social media is about the sales, communication or marketing space. But this approach fails to recognise that the impacts of a channel that is ubiquitous are themselves ubiquitous, and that social media can directly and very quickly impact the market. Managing it, therefore, has to be wholly integrated into corporate strategy, governance and risk. Fortunately, the market is responding to this need and new technologies are becoming available.

The Brandle Presence Manager is one that I am aware of that provides a centralised system for businesses to discover what digital and social assets are out there, create an inventory and monitor where it is being said across all the business social media platforms. This is social media governance and compliance at the enterprise level.

Here’s an example.

In 2013 US stocks plunged temporarily when an announcement about a bomb at the White House was made via the Associated Press Twitter account, which had been hacked. Action by Twitter (which suspended the account) and AP ensured the account was quickly taken offline. But the tweet was shared over 3000 times in the few minutes that it remained up. AP immediately confirmed the news was not true, but the Dow Jones nevertheless plunged 120 points within a couple of minutes and reached 143 points down before it recovered. Subsequent reports suggest over $20 billion worth of stock changed hands during the brief trading hiccup.

Also last year in the US, tweets sent from a hoax Twitter account disguised as a well-known equity research group caused a sell-off in a Silicon Valley company. This potentially illegal act of financial manipulation was subsequently investigated by the US regulator.

In August 2012 an Italian journalist set up a fake Twitter account for a member of Russia’s government and tweeted that the President of Syria had been killed, causing brief fluctuations in the oil markets.

And in January 2013 in Australia the share price of listed company Whitehaven Coal dropped 6 per cent after a fake press release lit up the online networks. The release, claimed to be from the ANZ Bank, asserted that a recent loan to Whitehaven had been withdrawn, which would have had a significant impact on its Maules Creek project. Both Whitehaven and the ANZ later confirmed the hoax, but not before $314 million was wiped off the share price and trading in the company was brought to a halt. The year before, trading in Macmahon Holdings was halted when hoax emails prompted takeover speculation, and retailer David Jones was the subject of a similar false takeover bid.

While market rumours are nothing new, social media means information (true or false) can reach people — shareholders, the media, regulators — faster than a company can respond. The potentially damaging impact of social media is not, however, limited to hoaxes.

Last year, for example, Netflix announced it had exceeded a billion hours to its 250 000 Facebook subscribers, which the Securities and Exchange Commission (the US equivalent of ASIC) interpreted as a violation of Regulation Fair Disclosure. Netflix argued the announcement was very public, since its following included shareholders, bloggers and journalists.

Although there were other factors in the case (the information had already been widely shared and was not relevant to the share price), the event triggered hot debate on what legitimate conversation looks like in the social era. In April the SEC announced that social media could be used to communicate company information provided investors were told first. This decision bridges existing and emerging practice, acknowledging that social media is a legitimate and ongoing channel without letting companies off the hook with respect to existing obligations.

In the US various regulatory bodies have published guidelines on the use of social media. The UK has limited new regulatory guidance on social media with respect to monitoring, communication, promotion and market abuse.

In Australia, working closely with ASIC, the Australian Stock Exchange updated its guidance on disclosure in 2013, advising companies to monitor online for sensitive information to ensure that the market trades fully informed. Further, company secretaries must consider its impacts with respect to risk. The ASX was clear that it did not expect companies to monitor every single comment but only for market-sensitive information, material transactions and market speculation. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has said all businesses should monitor platforms and have 24 hours (or longer for small businesses) to act on misleading information. Businesses are responsible for comments made by others on their sites.

Irrespective of the country you live in and the laws that apply in that jurisdiction, you need to be thinking about monitoring social media and managing its impact on recruitment, training, liability, confidentiality, privacy, security, advertising, IP, consumers and third parties, to name but a few.

Here again, monitoring tools give you a complete picture of your social footprint and a way to protect your IP. Brandle, for example, allows you to discover authorised and unauthorised uses of corporate IP and monitor your designated inventory for regulatory compliance to ensure proper disclosures are present.

In Australia I have recently been talking to Note8; a social tool that helps companies manage ASX listing requirements. There are sure to be more of these, which will make governance easier.

Why do you have to pay attention to social media? It impacts every area of life and with ever more people expected to go online and predictions that the social media audience will reach 2.55 billion by 2017, these impacts are set to increase.

Chapter summary

Whether you like it or not, you are involved in social media. Ensure that you:

• have a social media crisis strategy in place
• have the right governance — put policies in place to manage its use and ensure appropriate controls at the board or executive level
• know what the law says in your country.