social media
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Note that it’s not always wise to set a global publishing schedule, as each service has its own peak times-of-day for usage, but I’m only sharing a smattering of links that are interspersed with “direct” posts I manually do all day, so it’s not a concern for me. ↩
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I really like those fancy paragraph-specific links the Times has on its digital articles. ↩
NJ lawyers need a social media policy for employees
NJ lawyers need a social media policy for employees
Jennifer Marino Thibodaux of Gibbons writes:
The subject attorneys were retained to defend a town and its police sergeant in a personal injury action. One attorney directed his paralegal to conduct Internet research about the plaintiff. The paralegal accessed the public portions of the plaintiff’s Facebook page, and sent the plaintiff a “friend” request without disclosing her association with the attorneys. The plaintiff accepted the friend request, and the paralegal obtained information the attorneys could use to impeach the plaintiff’s personal injury claims.
The paralegal’s use of Facebook here, as you can tell from the headline, did not turn out well for the attorney-employer. This story is a simple, quick warning to New Jersey attorneys: implement a social media policy reflective of the Rules of Professional Conduct so your employees know (and you can show later that your employees knew or should have known) that it’s inappropriate to contact the opposing party on social media without identifying yourself and your employment.
NLRB: Overbroad social media policies may violate NLRA
NLRB: Overbroad social media policies may violate NLRA
Sue Reisinger, writing at Corporate Counsel:
In a warning to employers, the National Labor Relations Board has “unliked” certain social media policies that restrict an employee’s right to speak critically of the employer online, unless the policies were set in collective bargaining.
It’s clear many companies didn’t consider the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) implications when they developed their social media policies. It’s often HR professionals that have to draft these policies, but the onus can’t be placed solely on them to catch how the new rules might implicate nuances of the NLRA. Any company who has implemented or plans to implement a social media policy is well-advised to have a labor and employment attorney review it first.
The Perfect Empty Vessel
This is a good piece on how hard Facebook tries to keep the social juices flowing. Alexis Madrigal, commenting on Facebook’s designer-hiring spree:
As all these designers vanish into the bowels of the company, so, too, does their work. Facebook wants to create design that both allows and guides behavior without calling attention to itself. And what works in the Deep South must also work in southern India and South America. It must work for 16-year-olds and 86-year-olds.
I think this is the primary reason Facebook makes me uncomfortable: it’s too generic. Sometimes I want a service to be just a little in my way. I realize that you can’t generalize my preferences to hundreds of millions of people, but that just means I’ll never really feel awesome about using Facebook.
It feels like it’s been crafted as simply the most efficient way for me to send targeting data to advertisers…
…because it has.
What Bad Customer Service Costs Your Business
What Bad Customer Service Costs Your Business
Buffer, the service that will schedule your social network posts to go live throughout the day, also happens to have a wonderful blog. They focus on productivity and customer service.
Buffer’s customer service is excellent: I emailed them asking why I have to select publishing times for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other services individually instead of setting a global schedule for all services, and they replied within the hour.1 The infographic they posted was created by HelpScout, the folks who do Buffer’s customer service, so know where to find this data.
The takeaway? Customer service is absolutely as important as feature development and marketing, and not enough companies know that.
NLRB refines position on employee social media and workplace criticism
NLRB refines position on employee social media and workplace criticism
My personal policy is to refrain from discussing work on social media. In all my years of Twitter-ing and Facebook-ing, I’ve posted only a very few work-related updates, invariably focused on interpersonal minutiae like elevator rudeness. I think it’s just best to leave work at work. However, as the Times's Steven Greenhouse reports, the National Labor Relations Board recently ruled that conversational exchanges about working conditions between multiple employees on social media may be construed as the kind of concerted activity protected by the National Labor Relations Act.
The Times story to which I link in this post’s headline mentions at least two instances (here and here1) where the termination of lone complainers was upheld by the NLRB. This ruling suggests that my personal policy is a safe bet: there’s no way to engage in concerted activity if you’re venting alone.