This post was inspired by an Australian Law Firm raising the question for Social Media Laws – given a series of risk that were stated on the companies blog. And as more and more company officers wonder how to deal with it and what kind of rules to establish and what kind of measures IT should take, I thought about the approximately 500 Million People who discuss those companies, their teams, products or services and how some LAW could stop the conversation:
1) Adding a statement on every advertising that customers shall not share or redistribute, discuss or blog about the particular advertising they were confronted with. Could be in a similar way like the drug industry is doing it.
2) Phone systems shall add to the phrase “this call may be monitored ….” the phrase, “you agree to not discuss, share or redistribute parts or the full content of the conversation you are going to have with any of our employees, agents, call centers, partners or anybody directly or indirectly related to this call in any media otherwise known as social media”.
3) Customer contracts may need to be augmented that a user of the product is not allowed to share the experience with the product, adjacent products, the company, the partner or any other third party the company is associated with, in any media in particular social media.
4) Product descriptions may need an addendum that explains that any part of the description may not be discussed in social media and any information from social media is neither a suggestion from the company or any of it’s contributing third parties or partners. Customer has to ask the company if any of the suggested usage stated in social media is conflicting withe the intended usage of the manufacturer before attempting using the product in any different way. The request has to be in writing and the letter has to be sent to…
5) The owner of the product is responsible that in case the product is provided to be used by somebody else, that this user is in compliance with the above rules and regulations and agrees to not mention, comment, state or otherwise discuss anything about the respective product.
A corresponding law may need to govern import restrictions so that ANYTHING, product or service or even visitors to the respective country need to sign when entering the respective country to obey to this law.
The positive side effect is that it will create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in consulting and law firms as well as government departments across the world!
Did I miss anything?
Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS
P.S. a personal note:
Dear Malcolm Burrows,
I have a lot of respect for your business and am sure you did this with all the best intent helping your clients to protect them from the social media “threat”. But think of it this way: Our society thrived with the Internet despite the fact that we never created an “Internet Law” – probably because of that. Do you really want a LAW to govern the global social web?
