Who Owns Your Company's Social Media Accounts?
There's no doubt that social network sites like Facebook and Twitter have become a free, and highly effective, way of marketing business products or services. Some businesses rely heavily on company-operated social network accounts and have accumulated thousands of valuable leads in the form of followers.
Who Owns Your Online Real Estate?
But does your business actually claim ownership of these social network accounts, or do your employees? If you're not sure, you might want to take steps to legally secure the accounts under the company's name. Otherwise you may end up in a legal battle and possibly without a valuable business-marketing tool.
This exact scenario is playing out now at technology review website called PhoneDog.
In the Doghouse
Apparently, a former employee named Noah Kravitz created a Twitter account and began using it to promote blogs using the username @PhoneDog_Noah. The entire business soon relied on this account as its official micro-blog outlet, and it gathered 17,000 followers over the course of a few years.
And wouldn't you know it -- Mr. Kravitz stopped working for PhoneDog and took the account he created with him.
Now the business is suing its former employee in an attempt to retrieve the disputed account and followers. It's a messy situation, and the company could have avoided it with a little more thought and planning.
It's really the responsibility of the business to create a business account or to have documentation stating that they give an employee or third party permission to make an account on their behalf. According to Twitter TOS:
Get It in Writing
"You may use the Services only if you can form a binding contract"
This tells me that only company owner(s) can legally create an account, or it needs documented proof to show the business authorized an employee to create an account on the company's behalf.
I'm not sure how this particular case will play out, but it's clearly not a situation that any business wants to be in. So my advice is to create legally binding social network accounts where there is no confusion over ownership. If you don't, you might just find yourself in the social networking doghouse like PhoneDog.
