December 28, 2011 Social Media Ownership: Does your employer own your network? Social Media Share this post: You are your ( social ) network The case of Noah Kravitz has hit front page and, rightly so. If you haven’t heard about it, you should read this article in the New York Times. In short, Noah Kravitz is being sued for damages – to the tune of $340,000 — by his former employer, PhoneDog Media, for leaving the company and “keeping” his 17,000 followers on Twitter. The $340K is justified based on a rate of $2.50 per follower per month. The question is who owns the 17,000 followers of Noah’s [Twitter] Ark? On the one hand, at the request of the company, Noah managed to create an account that legitimately attracted so many followers (note that he achieved those followers without a follow-you-back strategy, since he only follows a couple of hundred people). With the current mass media followup (New York Times, CNN, L’Expansion…), Noah has gained another 7K followers. Hum, I wonder if PhoneDog would not like to go after those as well! At stake is the setting of precedence on the value of a follower as well as the potential encroachment of who owns your network. Who owns who? I have written about this whole issue in the past. And, I find the problem posed extremely relevant for the new management myndset. There are certain black & white instances where a company account and its followers/fans belong outright to the brand. A brand’s Facebook page is a good example. However, in the case of social networks which are nominative, there is distinctly more grey matter. For example, a community manager for a Facebook page may end up, if he/she does a great job, with many clients also asking to “friend” on their personal page. It would be highly awkward for a company to state whether or not the individual should accept a friend request. Unlike other traditional marketing efforts (ad campaign, poster…), the power of the social media marketing is that it has returned the individual to the center of the puzzle. You’re as good as the company you keep Who you know, counts. Whereas in the past, the notion that you are as strong as your network may have been true, but not visible, the visibility of your network (colleagues, friends, fans & followers) on the web has changed the parameters. My great grandmother passed along to my father the saying that you are as good as the company you keep. My father passed it along to me and I have been living that maxim to the fullest. Individuals set all sorts of different filters and qualifications as to the friends they choose to “accept” or to follow or to follow back. This lawsuit — which presumably has a number of subplots — will make corporations wake up to the power of the individual social media expert within its walls. Your company is as good as the employees it keeps Now, in a little twist, but equally true, your company is as good as the employees it keeps. As management, HR and their legal counsel, weigh the alternatives — including possibly cracking down on individual Twitter accounts and the like — here are some thoughts that they might want to ponder before rushing off to change their social media guidelines and policy: does an individual employee (for example, a “community manager“) have specific goals and objectives for his/her Twitter or LinkedIn account? does the individual have authority to write about your brand under his/her name? does the individual have the right to write personal commentaries (i.e. about personal interests) on the branded account? does a recently recruited individual, who comes with 5,000 Linkedin connections and 5,000 Facebook friends and/or 10,000 Twitter followers, get to charge back the company for every favorable tweet/like/retweet? Twittering gets personal The strength of a Twitter account relies on the individual(s) that are behind the handle. Just as branding must get more personal in this internet-connected world, managing a Twitter account needs to be considered personally. One’s Twitter account should be considered a part of one’s own personal eReputation. I have no idea as to the legitimacy of the claims made by PhoneDog and there are presumably elements to the case that would make any judgment rash on my part. It appears that Noah left on “good terms,” but that seems circumspect under the current circumstances. That said, the main points to retain from this case are that: (a) there is no basis for a $2.50/follower/month value; (b) the quality of the followers depends on the quality (i.e. intelligence, timeliness, interactivity and reactivity) of the content and, therefore, of the quality of the hands on the keyboard; (c) if you want to attract social media talent, it is unlikely that claiming ownership of and/or pursuing your outgoing social media manager is going to make you attractive to other social media mavens. It is just like wanting to confiscate the contact list in your address book (the old Rolodex). If anything, HR teams — especially for consumer brands — should be welcoming individuals who can rack up large number of loyal followers. Finding and retaining the good staff is the real issue. NEWSletter Subscribe to Minter’s Bi-Weekly NEWSletter and receive a free copy of the exclusive and updated 8 Golden Rules of an eReputation Your Gift For Signing Up 8 Golden Rules of an eReputation SUBSCRIBE! You have Successfully Subscribed! branding, ereputation, Facebook, linkedin, marketing, social media, social media guidelines, twitter Minter Dial Minter Dial is an international professional speaker, author & consultant on Leadership, Branding and Digital Strategy. After a successful international career at L’Oréal, Minter Dial returned to his entrepreneurial roots and has spent the last ten years helping senior management teams and Boards to adapt to the new exigencies of the digitally enhanced marketplace. He has worked with world-class organisations to help activate their brand strategies, and figure out how best to integrate new technologies, digital tools, devices and platforms. Above all, Minter works to catalyse a change in mindset and dial up transformation. Minter received his BA in Trilingual Literature from Yale University (1987) and gained his MBA at INSEAD, Fontainebleau (1993). His newest book Heartificial Empathy, Putting Heart into Business and Artificial Intelligence, bowed in December 2018 and won the Book Excellence Award 2019 as well as being shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2019. It's available in Audiobook, Kindle and Paperback. He is also co-author of Futureproof (Pearson, Sep 2017) and sole author of The Last Ring Home (Myndset Press, Nov 2016), a book and documentary film, both of which have won awards and critical acclaim. Minter has a new book on leadership, You Lead, How being yourself makes you a better leader, published by Kogan Page, that released January 2021. It's easy to inquire about booking Minter Dial here. View all posts by Minter Dial Previous post Next post
Social Media Ownership: Does your employer own your network? | Specialist in branding, digital marketing, social media and eLearning to help transform your organization. | The Myndset by Minter Dial | Social media marketing | Scoop.it December 28, 2011 at 6:43 pm […] jQuery("#errors*").hide(); window.location= data.themeInternalUrl; } }); } themyndset.com – Today, 10:43 […]
"Social Media Ownership: Does your employer own your network?" un bon article sur l'histoire de @noahkravitz | Veille internet & médias sociaux | Scoop.it December 29, 2011 at 9:36 am […] jQuery("#errors*").hide(); window.location= data.themeInternalUrl; } }); } themyndset.com – Today, 1:36 […]
Joakim Nilsson January 2, 2012 at 4:21 pm Very interesting case this one. Whilst one would argue that conditions for the twitter account should have been made in writing before his departure, we know that this is seldom the case. I see where PhoneDog is coming from and one can distantly recognise their pain when having invested in both time and money into his twitter account. But what are they thinking when suing him? How could this possible make the situation better? They are creating global headlines and just lucking like a-holes, the value is of course not in the 17K followers but in the person that attracted those followers I.e. Noah.
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Who owns your Twitter bio at work? | Thought leadership in branding and digital marketing | The Myndset by Minter Dial April 11, 2012 at 7:30 am […] December 2011, I wrote up the saga about Noah Kravitz (see the original post “Social Media Ownership” here) and the issue of who owns your social media profile while you are working for and/or representing […]