Everyone who's anyone is getting into social media. It's the P2B; the Place 2 Be. Particularly if you're a B2C. Marketing gurus trumpet the opportunity available for businesses using social media. The upside is the unprecedented ability to interact with your customers. The downside is your customers' ability to interact with you.

It can be pretty risky giving people a public platform to say what they think. First you have the PR risk. The danger of interactivity is that you can lose control of the conversation, and maybe your reputation.

Then there's the legal risk. Obviously you can be liable for whatever claptrap you publish yourself. On top of that you can be liable for material that other people post on your social media site too. You can be liable for defamatory comments, misleading or deceptive conduct and intellectual property infringement, among other things.

Here's an example. Recently a business called Allergy Pathway set up a Facebookpage that had some customer testimonials posted on its wall. The Federal Court decided that the testimonials were misleading. Allergy Pathway was liable for them because it knew they were there and didn't take them down. Result? Penalties. Embarrassing corrections on its Facebookpage. Nightmare! Take a look: http://www.facebook.com/allergypathway#!/allergypathway

There are a few legal variations on this same theme. Once you know (or should reasonably know) that material on your social media site is misleading or defamatory or infringes someone else's IP, if you leave it there you can be liable for it.

The solution is to establish a notice and takedown regime. Basically it's a complaints process. You provide a contact point for complaints. You monitor it. And if you receive a complaint, you quickly make a decision about whether to take down the offending material. In most cases if you follow this approach you can avoid legal exposure.

We could go on about this stuff all day. If you're a tech law nerd it's really interesting. But if you're a business contemplating whether and how to use social media, the thing to know is that it's not as scary as you might have heard, but equally not something you want to dive into totally blind.

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