By: Social media Today If you own a small business with products that rely heavily on e-commerce, maintaining a website and social media presence is more than a necessity.  Blogging your service is also a great way to drive traffic to your blog and website. As such, procuring web space for a blog is essential in order to make surfers aware of your product or service while driving traffic to your company’s website. However, simply establishing a blog and updating it with content is not enough. Massive competition for clicks and views—user attention—is ubiquitous online, so it is wise to  [ Read More ]

Good news for anyone who’s ever been tagged in a Facebook photo doing something less-than work safe: It’s now illegal in California for your boss to demand access to your Facebook page. Gov. Jerry Brown took to Twitter and Facebook, appropriately enough, to announce Tuesday that he had signed two new Internet privacy bills aimed at protecting employees and students from social media snooping by employers and Universities. The first bill, AB 1844, was introduced in the state assembly by San Jose’s Nora Campos, makes it illegal for employers to require job seekers and employees to provide the username and  [ Read More ]

By Catherine Dunn | New Jersey Law Journal As social media use continues to overlap more fluidly between the personal sphere and the business world, more employers are writing dedicated social media polices, and many are also monitoring employee use of social media sites at work, according to a new survey. The data comes from Proskauer Rose’s second annual “Social Media in the Workplace Around the World 2.0” report. In 2012, 68.9 percent of employers said they’ve created policies specifically for social media use, compared to 55.1 percent in 2011. Among the nearly 250 multinational businesses surveyed in the past  [ Read More ]

The Internet has changed how people communicate and do things like pay bills. Thus, it is no surprise that social media has changed how debt collectors find and communicate with people. Today, it is easier than ever before for collection agencies and their staff to hunt down debtors. With a simple search, one can find a wealth of information about an individual: everything from their phone number to their current address. This is why you need to be careful about what content you put on the Internet and why you should not hide from debt collectors. When you post information  [ Read More ]

by Ani Barsamian, JD Posted In: Legal Malpractice We’ve all heard and seen some crazy and ridiculous stories about people posting inappropriate pictures on Facebook. Many people post their entire life on Facebook, from their wedding day, to their dog, to their breakfast lunch and dinner, to their child’s birth, to their kids first day at school, to pictures of them in their bikinis! Although these pictures are sometimes out of place, I can’t hold it against them. They are allowed to post their own pictures on their own Facebook pages. However, what gets to me the most is when  [ Read More ]

By: Beverly Macy | Co-founder and CEO, Gravity Summit LLC Can you believe we’ve just sailed past the first half of 2012? Social media continues to make inroads into our business lives and is finally being taken seriously by business leaders in most industries from entertainment to healthcare to financial services to non-profits and beyond. Here’s 3 Big Trends to Watch for the Next 6 Months: 1. Social Goes Visual From Pinterest to Instagram and more, social has gone visual. The way that news and information is organized and distributed has gone visual. Curating and social sharing of content visually  [ Read More ]

Everyone knows that workers who badmouth their bosses on Facebook or otherwise act out via social media can be a headache for human-resources departments. But in a growing number of cases, the actual transgression is not the problem so much as dealing with colleagues anxious to turn the bad actor in. That’s the word from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), which in a recent story posted on SHRM Online outlined the problem of “Facebook snitches,” workers who seek out bosses — sometimes armed with printouts — to report instances of co-workers making inappropriate comments about their jobs online.  [ Read More ]

By Pedram Tabibi | Young Island Twitter’s popularity is growing by the day, and the Tweet is now a daily (and preferred) method of communication for many. According to a recent infographic, there are currently over 465 million registered Twitter accounts and well over 100 million active users. Even I entered the Twitter world @PedramTabibi. Twitter is also beginning to see green, as Twitter’s projected advertising revenue will surpass half a billion dollars ($540 million) by 2014. At the same time, however, there are responsibilities and laws that come with Twitter use. As companies increasingly integrate social media platforms into  [ Read More ]

Posted Mar 12, 2012 11:59 AM CDT By Debra Cassens Weiss | ABA Journal Law News Now Large law firms trying to attract notice from corporate counsel are increasingly turning to social media to showcase their expertise—and hiring experts to make it happen. Several of the nation’s top law firms are hiring full-time social media specialists, the Washington Post reports. They include Nixon Peabody, which plans to have its first social media manager on board in April, and Latham & Watkins, which hired a former legal journalist last year to oversee its social media platforms. The story cites an American  [ Read More ]

As the popularity of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter continues to grow, so too do employers continue to struggle with addressing social media issues in an effective, yet legal, way. A byproduct of this struggle is a social media report released by the National Labor Relations Board’s Acting General Counsel in late January. It provides a summary of all social media cases reviewed by the NLRB within the last year. The NLRB considered fourteen cases in 2011, with those cases involving two primary categories. One category of cases involved whether the written policy of an employer was  [ Read More ]