Category: Social Networking and Web 2.0

National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

national breast cancer awarenes month

October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Compliance Building, like many others, has gone pink to promote and support the world’s fight against breast cancer.

After watching the NFL players sporting pink accents on Sunday, I figured I could do the same thing. So I updated the website and changed many of the colors to pink.

Since the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month began in 1985, mammography rates have more than doubled for women age 50 and older and breast cancer deaths have declined. As a result, breast cancer deaths are on the decline. Encourage the women in your life to get mammograms on a regular basis.

You can also offer financial support. I encourage you to donate to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women in the United States, aside from skin cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, an estimated 192,370 new cases of invasive breast cancer are expected to be diagnosed among women in the United States this year. An estimated 40,170 women are expected to die from the disease in 2009 alone. Today, there are about 2.5 million breast cancer survivors living in the United States.

Thanks to the folks at Corporate Compliance Insights for giving me the idea: CCI “Goes Pink” To Support Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Compliance: What Are Companies Doing?

SCCE policies

The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association conducted a survey among compliance and ethics professionals in late August 2009 to see what employers are doing about the use of these sites by their employees.

They got back almost 800 responses from their members using an online survey tool.

  • 50% of respondents reported that their company does not have a policy for employee online activity outside of the workplace
  • Of those companies that do have a policy, 34% include it in a general policy on online usage
  • Of those companies that do have a policy, just 10% specifically address the use of social network sites

“While the data indicates that many organizations have had to discipline employees for improper activity online, the fears may outweigh the actual risks. A survey asking about discipline regarding improper email usage would likely yield much higher numbers.”

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Compliance: What Are Companies Doing? pdf-icon

Social Networking for Legal Administrators

ALA

I am giving two presentations today to the Boston Chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators at their 5th Annual One Day Educational Conference. In the morning, my presentation is Social Networking 101 and the afternoon is Social Networking 201.

Social Networking 101

This session is for those who don’t know about social networking and want to find out what it is and how it is used.

Here is the slidedeck on the basics of how law firms and legal administrators can use these tools:

Social Networking 101

Social Networking 201

The afternoon session is with Henry Chace and Scott Katz of Burns & Levinson LLP. We will focus on the potential benefits, which tools are appropriate, and useful, in a professional environment, and the pitfalls to be aware of as you deal with the social networking tools.

Intellectual Property and Social Media

social-media_580x1501

This afternoon I am at the Harvard Club in New York City participating in Social Media: Risks & Rewards, an Incisive Media event. These are my notes from this session. Now that you are in social media, how do you deal with trademark and copyright issues? How do you protect them?

Speakers:

  • Valerie L. Boccadoro, Senior Intellectual Property Counsel of Toys R Us
  • Lesley Rosenthal, Vice President, General Counsel & Secretary of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.
  • Robert Ambrogi, Attorney of Law Office of Robert Ambrogi

Bob started off with a 12 part copyright quiz.

  1. Linking is not copyright infringement
  2. If it does not say it’s copyrighted, it’s not protected. False.
  3. As long as someone uses only uses an except they are free to republish it as fair use? False.
  4. If a material is copied for non-commercial use, it okay? No.
  5. A tweet is not protected by copyright law? False.
  6. If it’s old, I am free to use it. False.
  7. I am not liable for copyright infringement committed by others on my site. False (There are protections to the site owner, but you need to meet the specific requirements.)
  8. As the publisher I am free to grant permission to use material posted on my site. False. The writer holds the copyright.
  9. If I paid for it to be created, I own the copyright. False. This is subject to the “work for hire rules.”
  10. The copyright owner retains control of material posted to a social networking. False. (Although it may depend on the site and its term of service.)
  11. If it’s under a creative commons license, it is free to reuse. False. Creative commons is just a licensing structure.
  12. If material is posted anonymously, it is not copyright protected. False. The creator still holds the copyright.

Valerie was up next. Social media does not create any new rights. But things do move faster. There are things that they should do. First, you should do site sweeps, checking out sites and see how people are using your trademarks. The second step is to consider whether to enforce the trademark against the third party. Valerie provided a series of legal issues to consider and business issues to consider. The third step is report problems to the sites. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have procedures for dealing with these issues. The fourth step is the traditional enforcement. Start with asking before bringing in the lawyers. The reality is that you cannot stop all infringement.

Last up was Lesley. She pointed out that non-profits have many of the same issues as businesses. She focuses on educating the people in her organization. Lincoln Center has several Facebok pages and Twitter handles. They are experiencing astronomic growth in fans and followers. They have lots of focus on clearing rights in their publications. You need to enforce or you risk abandonment of the mark.

Social Media Best Practices

social-media_580x1501

This afternoon I am at the Harvard Club in New York City participating in Social Media: Risks & Rewards, an Incisive Media event. My second panel presentation is Social Media Best Practices. (My morning presentation was Develop your Company’s Corporate Policy for Social Media.)

I was joined on the panel by:

  • John Lipsey, Vice President Corporate Counsel Services of LexisNexis, acting as the moderator
  • Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks
  • Eugene Weitz, soon to be former Corporate Counsel of Alcatel-Lucent
  • Daniel Goldman, Legal Counsel of Mayo Clinic

Unlike the earlier presentations which focused on what the company should be doing, this panel is focusing on how the individual lawyers in the audience could use social media to help them.

Here is the slide deck we are using:

Social Media Best Practices

Vanessa will be starting off with some highlights from her 2009 Networks for Counsel Studypdf-icon. (A Global Study of the Legal Industry’s Adoption of Online Professional Networking, Preferences, Usage and Future Predictions.)

Then Dan spends some time leading the discussion about Twitter.

I take over and talking about blogging as a personal knowledge management tool. You can get some sense of what I am going to say if you read Why I Blog.

Eugene then focuses on online professional networking. (He hates the term social networking.) He makes a case why it is particularly useful for in-house counsel.

We end with a discrete set of takeaways for the audience.

I plan to present two takeaways. First, listen to what people are saying about you and your company. Set up a Google news search and a Google blog search for your name and your company’s name. Second, use a blog as a personal knowledge management tool.

Vanessa has a great 20 minute action plan.

Your Business and the Social Media Sensation

social-media_580x1501

This morning I am at the Harvard Club at the Social Media: Risks & Rewards conference. The line-up for this panel:

  • Moderator: Monica Bay, Editor-in-Chief of Law Technology News
  • Michele Mitchell, VP of Audience Development and Retention of NBC Universal
  • Cheryl Givner, Managing Counsel Worldwide Marketing & Core Products of MasterCard Worldwide
  • Nicole Black, Of Counsel Fiandach & Fiandach
  • Andy Mitchell, VP Digital Marketing and Marketing Development of CNN Worldwide

Cheryl started off look at corporate brands in social media. Her first point was the United Breaks Guitars video complaint. Over 5.5 million people saw this and created a viral backlash against United. MasterCard runs a lot of analytics on what people are saying about the company. They just launched a Twitter feed: @MasterCardNews.

Niki emphasized the need for goals. But at the minimum, you need to know the basics of how these tools work. Then she moved on to the benefits of some of the major social media tools. She emphasized that professional networking and personal/social networking overlap. (Aren’t some of your professional colleagues also your friends?) People want to connect with a person when dealing with legal services.

Niki also pointed out that if you”lawyer-up” when you are subject to negative social media attention you are likely to increase the negative publicity. Demanding that someone remove criticism of your company is more likely to backfire.

Andy took the microphone to discuss how CNN has been using social media and how they involve their audience. There was the first presidential Twitter debate last year. CNN moved on to Facebook and took advantage of the Facebook Connect tool. The first test of their use of Facebook was one of the vice-presidential debate (“Debate the Debate”). CNN was out on the cutting edge of these tools for a mainstream media company. They generate tremendous traffic, updates and views. He made a strong case for how much consumers want to engage with brands. “Give up some control of your brand (But not so much that you risk harming your brand)”

Michele focused on social media trends. She emphasized the importance of a feedback loop. After all the ability to easily connect with consumers is a key way to leverage social media.

There was a question from the audience that emphasized the need to engage the legal department in developing the tools. An example was a marketing promotion for a hashtags sweepstakes and free shipping special. It ended up with a complaint from a state attorney general.

My first presentation is scheduled right after this one. I already published the outline and materials for the event: Develop your Company’s Corporate Policy for Social Media.

Develop your Company’s Corporate Policy for Social Media

social-media_580x1501

This morning I am at the Harvard Club in New York City participating in Social Media: Risks & Rewards an Incisive Media event. My first presentation is Develop your Company’s Corporate Policy for Social Media with David Morris, Group Counsel of TripAdvisor Media Group and Howard Greenstein, President of The Harbrooke Group.

The approach we took in creating a policy is to first decide the company’s position on using social media: Deter and block, Neutral or Actively Engage. Since are three of us on the panel, we each plan to take one of these positions and discuss a variety of topics that should be considered in a social media policy.

Here are the introductory slides and topic slides:

Develop your Company’s Corporate Policy for Social Media

Here are some sample social media policies that we shared with audience:

I also keep a ragtag collection of good policies and good articles on drafting policies using Delicious bookmarks: http://delicious.com/dougcornelius/blogging_policy.

More on Free and Legal Services: WhichDraft

WhichDraft

After my previous post on Free and Law Firms, a new thing caught my attention in this area. In that post, I focused on some ways that the legal services industry is adopting some of the models Chris Anderson describes in his book.

WhichDraft is a resource that allows users to build a variety of high quality contracts free of charge. Users build contracts by answering a series of simple questions. WhichDraft then provides sample contractual provisions. It has a collection of interesting precedents that help you produce a better first draft of legal documents. By asking a few questions, the site fills in some key blanks and repetitive information.

I was a big fan of document assembly when I was at my prior law firm. But I hated the bulky desktop programs and all the training it took to show people how to use them. When you look at the time it takes to install the programs and train people, you end up with a huge additional investment on top of the software and document template drafting costs.

When document assembly finally evolved and began offering the assembly through a web-based interface, I think document assembly became ready for prime time. Set up is just a single installation on a server. Training is just showing people where to find the tool and 2-minute demo (at least it should be).

You can add WhichDraft to

References:

free the future of a radical price by Chris Anderson