Social Media: Legal Risk & Corporate Policy

Lawyers and jurists, corporate policymakers, and government regulatory agencies have only just begun to address the practical business and legal risk issues raised by the proliferation of social media channels and content.

Social Media: Legal Risk & Corporate Policy explores the implications suggested by the precursors of a forthcoming tidal wave of social media-related civil litigation, the spectrum of potential corporate policy approaches to reducing the risks inherent in social media use, and the social media service privacy policy minefield that all social media participants, corporate and individual, will have to navigate if they want to optimize what little control they have over information shared by using social media.

Highlights of the book include:

• The practical litigation implications of social media cases likely to be of relevance to business enterprises are examined
• The issue of attorney ethics in a social media context
• Civil cases that have involved social media are discussed and classified by type
• The reasons for having a corporate social media policy
• A discussion of the fundamental areas generally covered by social media policies
• A policy creation "toolkit" that organizes and provides sample provisions with which to build a social media policy are included. These provisions are classified by topic and represent a range of potential ways to communicate and document corporate policy on social media
• Exploration of class action litigation that has been filed against social media services disputing certain practices related to their use of personally identifiable information
• The privacy policies provisions of five major social media service providers are classified and identified

Social Media: Legal Risk & Corporate Policy is intended for professionals in various roles within the business enterprise that include responsibility for social media, or for those who seek to understand the subject matter for other reasons. Lawyers can learn about social media in litigation; corporate policymakers can identify social media risks and learn how to craft policy in response to these risks; and social media specialists within the business enterprise can understand what information is at stake in their forays into social media and what risks can threaten the opportunities that abound online. Corporate executives with overarching responsibility for steering the enterprise should also have an understanding of these issues, because social media is only going to become a more important influence in the success of their businesses.