Page 394 - Social Media Marketing for Dummies

Legal

The people who are the most worried about social media are usually the folks on
the legal teams. They get concerned about whether something that is published
can violate someone else’s copyright or make the company liable in some form.
The legal teams are definitely justified in their fear, and although there are no
potentially overlapping responsibilities between the legal team and the social
media marketers, it’s important to set clear rules covering what can and can’t be
published on the social media platforms. In scenarios that don’t conform to those
parameters, the social media marketers should meet with the legal teams to dis-
cuss the exceptions. The more the legal teams understand what the marketers are
trying to accomplish via social media strategically, and the more the marketers
understand the rules and regulations — both internal ones and those established
by government agencies — the stronger the partnership between the two teams
will be. Legal involvement becomes critical when reviewing licensing rights to
images and video, especially as those rights pertain to celebrities, athletes, and
competitor logos.

Having the legal teams review every single response and every single comment
published may not be realistic. But as long as the proper rules, escalation strate-
gies, and processes are in place, the legal teams should be comfortable with social
media marketers publishing content on a regular basis without direct approvals.
The rules, however, probably need to vary dramatically from industry to industry.
In some more regulated industries, approvals of every piece of content might be a
necessary evil.

Introducing Social Media

Governance Models

Every organization requires social media governance. Whether large or small, if
you’re a company using social media, you require governance models in place. The
hypercollaboration required to succeed (as witnessed by the topics discussed pre-
viously) necessitates strong governance models between both marketing and
other functions and within marketing, too.

Coordinating this collaboration gets increasingly complex when you have global
and local marketing teams and also marketing teams broken up by product lines.

Following are the key governance models to consider:

» Centralized governance: In a centralized social media governance model,
one team is responsible for SMM and drives the daily management of the

378 PART 5 Old Marketing Is New Again with SMM