Ride the Lightning

Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Social Media at Coca-Cola and Sprint

June 23, 2010

We enjoyed our recent trip to New York City (too many gerbils in that cage) where we attended ALM's General Counsel Conference. The conference was excellent, we were pleased to discuss the new Sensei/Applied Discovery SM-ART (Social Media – Assessment, Risks and Techniques) offering with Valerie Pelton from The Posse List and Katey Wood from The 451 Group.

In one excellent session, representatives from Coca-Cola and Sprint discussed how their companies use social media. Both companies embrace its use, calling their cadre of social media users "ninjas" on behalf of their companies. In both companies, Facebook is the third most visited site, which they seem to accept good-naturedly while recognizing that a certain amount of the visits are undoubtedly personal.

Misuse of social media is not presumed – as they pointed out, if someone is really spending way too much time on social media, their work performance will suffer and it will become evident. Also (and they had a keen sense of humor about this), misuse of social media is often policed by colleagues, who are apparently quick to rat out an errant co-worker to a supervisor.

As to their social media policies (and these are critical) – if you boil them down, the essence is: "Be responsible for what you write – and don't be stupid." It takes several pages to say that, but that's the core message.

I also want to thank Dan Flannery of BRMW and Associates, Inc. for writing to contribute to the previous discussions of social media archiving. His company has a business product for social media archiving which may be found at https://www.arkovi.com.

Back to e-discovery for my next post, discussing online review tools. Don't change that dial. Amazing how outmoded that phrase has become.

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