Is your company a legal-savvy social media player? There may be more to it than you think. The digital legal experts at Pinsent Mason, publishers of Out-Law.com put together a few tips to keep you social media team out of court. Here’s what you should know.

It all comes down to conscious and responsible communication. Customers have expectations about how a company will interact with them, and they don’t like it when it surprises them. At the same time, customers have a big voice, so any mistake by a big brand could snowball into a potential PR disaster.

You can see the whole presentation here, but here are some of the key points:

• Have an internal social media policy. Keys here: respect the opinions of others, be transparent and respect confidentiality. Make the policy as organic and open as possible. And, if you use common sense you don’t need to have everything reviewed by the lawyers.
• Have an effective governance structure. Yes, governance. It’s good to have employees interacting with the public in the name of the company then there needs to be a structure in place to ensure a consistent corporate message. To wit, gross employee misconduct online has legal risks, and it should be made clear that unprofessional messages will be punished.
• Make sure your published material is updated and relevant. The UK’s Financial Service Authority has strict regulations to ensure customers aren’t mislead. The CAP Code, legislation that obliges companies to be truthful in their published materials, is being extended to company websites and social accounts in March 2011. The UK’s Office of Fair Trading, too, is promising a crack-down on paid-for content.
• Make privacy protection the default of everything you do. Make sure your customers know what they are revealing when they participate on your comment sections. If customers want to share more, then let them opt-in. Never force them.

The co-author of this report is Struan Robertson, a long-time collaborator in the SMI conference series. On occasion of this updated presentation, we thought we’d go back just a year to review his brilliant SMI presentation on the legal dangers of social media marketing and publishing. It’s still as timely as ever, maybe more so. Take a look:

Social Media Influence 2012 is scheduled for June 12 in London. On tap we have a dynamic lineup of speakers from GE, Google, Unilever, LivingSocial, Headshift and London 2012, to name just a few.

SMI is now in its seventh year, and is getting better with age. Here’s a look at one of our past events.

Now you can see all the presentations and photos from the conference at the SMI 2009 site.

Here’s a snapshot of the good stuff to view….

We all know that major brands have to adapt fast to the changing world of social media. Now Radar DDB has produced a Social Media Brandscape that seeks to show (with a healthy dose of humour) how well the world’s major brands have adapted to that change.

Social media brandscape from Radar DDB UK

The Social Media Influence conference that took place on March 3rd was a great success and included presentations from YouTube, LinkedIn, Radar DDB UK and Pinsent Masons. We’ll be posting videos of the day and the presentations online in the next few days.

In the meantime, catch up with conference feedback and photos on our new Netvibes Social Media Influence page.

In an age where the power of the consumer to influence brands and buying decisions grows in leaps and bounds (witness Tropicana’s decision to reverse part of its recent rebranding), the ideas of DDB Worldwide President and CEO Chuck Brymer are worth considering.

He argues that the time has come for companies and agencies to appoint a Chief Community Officer, or CCO, whose role would “oversees the relationship between brands and their communities, not just in the narrow confines of how a consumer interacts with a product at point of purchase but also in how consumers interact with each other.”

Brymer lays out his thinking in a new book, “The Nature of Marketing”. Here’s his vision of the Chief Community Officer:

Introducing the Chief Community Officer: Marketing has Changed, So Must Its Leadership

By Chuck Brymer

The Italian writer, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedosa wrote, “If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”  Nowhere is this truer than in the field of marketing where we have probably seen more change in the past five years than the previous fifty.

The increasing sophistication of consumers, new behavior-altering technologies, channel growth, media fragmentation, and the speed of transactions and innovations, among other factors, have all combined to challenge marketers regardless of company, industry, size, or geography. Every company, every brand, everyone now faces the same situation – how do we engage consumers to become brand loyalists and advocates?

A year ago, I addressed the Association of National Advertisers annual conference and shared my thoughts on how we should be reorganizing to take advantage of the changing face of marketing. One recommendation, which I continue to advocate strongly, is the introduction of a new marketing role: the Chief Community Officer (CCO).

We are moving away from a view of the world defined by what I call “herd marketing” and transitioning from monologue to dialogue and engagement. In this new era, successful brands will be built through brand communities and this broader view of marketing needs to resonate from the top of an agency downward. Someone at a very high level needs to take responsibility for guiding marketing efforts to reach and influence these communities.

This is one area where things need to change. We traditionally frame the marketing process around the endgame of selling products, to the point where some consider “sales and marketing” a unified discipline. Open a marketing textbook from 20 years ago, for example, and you will see a focus on the traditional “four Ps”: product, price, place, and promotion.

We must move from the four Ps to the three Cs, a construct I advocate in my book, The Nature of Marketing: Marketing to the Swarm as well as the Herd. These are conviction, collaboration, and creativity.  In this world a Chief Community Officer ideally oversees the relationship between brands and their communities, not just in the narrow confines of how a consumer interacts with a product at point of purchase but also in how consumers interact with each other.  These consumer-to-consumer interactions take place on the web and on the street and serve as a powerful influence in shaping our views and preferences.

The Chief Community Officer responsibility has relevance and value in any company that desires to effectively influence these consumer interactions and relationships. I see four key roles for this person. The first involves re-calibrating the way we think about brand building.

•    Instead of developing products and services by ‘listening’ to the market, a CCO makes sure consumers have a real voice in the process.
•    Instead of just creating brand advertising, a chief community officer works to build a community around your brand, using multiple channels
•    Instead of focusing on pre-sale activities and seeing areas like service and support as tacitly “someone else’s job,” a CCO takes great interest in what consumers are telling the company and each other
•    Instead of just disseminating a brand message, a CCO makes sure your organization is living their message
•    Instead of advocating for the consumer, the CCO views the entire community as the new consumer

The second role is to understand and manage points of leverage. A CCO should be someone who understands all patterns of influence online and offline, in much the same way a media planner understands patterns of media consumption. This means knowing the touch points of your brand community, studying their wants, needs, and lifestyles, and using these insights to inform your marketing efforts.

For instance, a traditional Chief Marketing Officer often looks for influencers to create ‘buzz’ among the media, the power users, the bloggers, and the industry experts. ‘Buzz’ is great but it is only one part of the equation.  To truly leverage influence, buzz must be joined by conviction and credibility.

And today, influence is everywhere. A CCO should ideally be a student of how these patterns of influence emerge and dissipate. What happens when a hot new product erupts online, or a public relations fiasco draws thousands of comments to the blogosphere? And how should you respond to these stimuli?

Clorox, for instance, has been very proactive in educating and listening directly to their consumers. In their own blog, DR. LAUNDY’s Weblog, a real scientist, who has worked for Clorox for over 30 years, answers questions from consumers and keeps people up-to-date on the latest innovations.  This is a great example of leveraging the community. It keeps Clorox highly visible in the search engine results and positions them as both expert and player in the category.

The third role is to monitor and respond to the community. For fun, try doing what your consumers do: go online and search for your product or service by name to see how people rate it and what they are saying on discussion boards.

Then go visit some of the online discussion forums devoted to consumer problems, like Consumerist.com. Now, try and see how companies respond to complaints. Once in a while, some of them will actually post a reply explaining their side of the story or apologize and make things right. More often than not, you will see no response at all. In my view, a chief community officer should be aware of what the swarm is saying and responsible for developing strategy to engage it appropriately.

The last role of the CCO is to serve as a community agent. Moving from delivering brand messages to engaging brand communities. Traditional marketers advocate being the “voice of the customer.” What I am proposing is that a CCO must learn where these consumers live and move there, at least figuratively.

The CCO is responsible for developing strategies that build brand influence and open opportunities for brands to engage more deeply  within social networks.  These networks have enormous influence over purchase intent and should be considered a key ingredient in the ability to generate sustainable relationships with customers.

It’s the question that is keeping the management of all companies awake at night: is there a single, cost-effective investment that can help grow a business even as the whole global economy is contracting?

The answer? By tapping into social media. If this sounds like the feel-good mantra of social media pundits, think again. It’s the advice of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising who earlier this year said they believe that those companies who harness social media will be best placed to adapt to the volatile decade to come. Smart advertisers are wasting no time. Brands like T-Mobile, Sony, Heineken, Levi’s and Burger King are investing in YouTube viral videos, Facebook loyalty campaigns and blogger outreach efforts to amplify their message and create some enduring buzz around their products and offerings. T-Mobile staged a flash mob-style dance routine at London’s Liverpool Street station that has become a YouTube sensation, generating over 5.5 million viewings from around the world in the first four weeks. Not a bad return on investment.

As these big brands are showing, smart companies realise they still need to promote their products and services to customers – they just need a more cost-effective and accountable way of doing it.

This new way of thinking is not just to impress the CFO. The truth is traditional and previously-proven forms of marketing are no longer as effective as they once were. In 2009, companies are demanding more concrete benchmarks for the success of advertising and marketing campaigns as they are confronted by evidence that once passive consumers are tuning out TV adverts and ignoring fancy banner ads and microsites. Where companies once dictated marketplace conversations, in a social media world they are now just one part of a vibrant and vocal community. As Coca-Cola’s VP of marketing Carol Kruse succinctly put it: “Our customers control our brands”.

A decade after the birth of Blogger, five years since the arrival of Facebook and three years after YouTube took the world by storm, the social media culture of commenting, tagging, poking, tweeting and creating mashups has become second nature for tens of millions of people around the world.

Major brands, at first slow to understand the power of this customer revolution, and then overly defensive once they began to appreciate its potency have embraced the give-and-take of social media conversation to the extent that over 350 top brands are now actively “engaging” with their customers online. Increasingly these companies are beginning to break down the walls preventing effective customer relationships that were built up (by them) through decades of “we know best” advertising, PR and marketing.

But while the rush is on to build a social media status, most companies and brands are still wary of how to navigate the social media world even as they grasp the opportunity and savings it offers them. Simply put, they want to know how they can achieve more from their marketing budgets when they have less money to spend even as they adapt and cater to the new consumer demands of today’s “marketplace”?

We believe the answer lies in a very simple (and natural process). Brands must start by listening and understanding what customers really care about. Then, and only then, brands can begin conversing effectively with customers about the products and services they offer. Get that right and soon both companies and customers are listening to and learning from each other. And that provides a measurable metric of how this meeting of mutual interests is raising the profile of the brand. Best of all this can be achieved at a fraction of the price of a £1 million scatter-shot TV ad or even a highly targeted yet-intrusive direct market campaign.

Engaging, compelling and measurable online marketing is what social media conversation offers. But first, just like T-Mobile, you’ll have to learn to do the dance.

- Matthew Yeomans and Bernhard Warner

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve added some new great speakers to the Social Media Influence 09 line-up.

They are:

Benjamin Faes, EMEA Head of YouTube

Ruth Speakman, Head of Corporate Communications, Sony Europe

Antony Mayfield, Head of Social Media, iCrossing UK

Olivier Creiche, VP & GM EMEA & LAT AM, Six Apart

Andy Hobsbawm, Chairman, Agency.com Europe

Four years after we launched our first social media-themed conference we have arrived at a point where social media is living up to its hype and is transforming the very nature of media and communication.

This year alone, the biggest financial story in a century was first reported on a blog, the biggest U.S. retailer began asking its own employees to review and comment on the products it sells and Starbucks asked you what you thought of its coffee, cakes and service.

Join us on March 3rd 2009 at the Cavendish Conference Centre in central London for a day’s conversation about how social media has finally come of age. And stay tuned here for conference updates and a daily dose of the top social media news.

TechCrunch posts a helpful how-to video guide, a nice primer on the do’s and don’ts of online video. This is indeed timely. My students at John Cabot University here in Rome are finishing their mobile journalism projects, a project initiated with help from our friends at Nokia. The JCU YouTube channel is here. There will be more videos up next week, tackling issues that affect Romans and life in the Eternal City.

Back to the TechCrunch piece, I cannot agree enough with their tips on how best to distribute video. It’s a one-word solution: YouTube. As TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley writes, “you must understand [about video distribution] that (a) It’s all about YouTube, and (b) It’s all about YouTube.”

Even Microsoft would agree. They got tremendous visibility for a spoof Vista video after it ended up on YouTube.

On 4 June, as part of the Social Media Influence conference, we’ll be going in-depth with a panel tackling
the growing impact of online video in corporate comms. The panel details are here:

4.30PM – 5.15PM

HAS VIDEO KILLED THE BLOGGING STAR?

Okay, we’re joking…..sort of.
But be it video-snacking, YouTube resumes, digital video activism or
live-streaming to the web from your mobile
phone, the world of Web 2.0 is being driven by the moving image. This
panel will examine the role video is playing in shaping communication
techniques within companies as well as helping reach new consumer
audiences.

Panel – Robin Hamman, Senior Community
Producer, BBC, Matthew Yeomans, Custom Communication and online media
tutor, Cardiff University, Robert
Andrews, Editor Paid Content UK, Mireia Fontbernat, Qik.com

– Bernhard