Today I am going to be talking about legal risk and risk mitigation within organizations that are implementing social media. As you may be away there are a lot of cases currently going through our court system here in Australia as well as in many other countries over seas where social media has become the central problem for these disputes. These matters can range simply from defamation of a person by naming them on your blog or attributing them in a bad way on a website right through to releasing confidential information by putting it on your facebook page or your personal blog.
More specifically though I would like to look into the legal risks that organizations as a whole face when implementing a social media system into there workplace. Also how are you able to mitigate these risks to ensure that you are entirely legally covered for anything and employee may decide to post on a social media site, whether that being while at work or at home.
Firstly today I will be introducing you to a company and how this company operates in order to demonstrate that if they were going to allow a social media system in there organization how they can control what happens within the work place. The organization that I will be going into today is McCraw Transport. McCraw Transport is a small family owned company that is split into three main sectors, these are the office staff who find loads to transport and file all the paper work, the mechanics who maintain and service the trucks and trailers, and finally there are the drivers who travel interstate transporting the goods. Some risks that social media implementation posses on this company is that if an employee was to be granted the use of social media tools at work, it could become unfair to other employees who would not be able to have that same access as there job needs them to be in a workshop or driving a truck all day where it would not be safe to be using these social tools. Furthermore there would be a blur on what social media contact would actually be used during paid work time and during break time for the drivers as they are constantly away from home and there employer where this can be monitored.
The way that all of this legal liability can be avoided is to create a social media policy for the company where it has the same terms for all sectors of employment. an example of this is say that social media can be used within the premise during your break times and while out on the road social media can only be used during your designated or required stop times and not during hours in which you are being paid for. Furthermore to state what can be posted on social media sites about the company can help, that way an employee can’t argue they unknowingly posted damaging the company. And finally this company could state in there social media policy that failing to adhere to the policy they can risk termination of there contract in order to mitigate all potential legal damage to the company.
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