ASKED & ANSWERED: Brian D. Wassom

Brian D. Wassom is a partner in the firm of Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn, with five Michigan offices. With a practice that focuses on intellectual property and First Amendment litigation, Wassom helps media companies and journalists understand their rights. He also authors a blog discussing the law of social media at wassom.com. This is Part II of the interview; Part I ran in last Thursday's edition, Nov. 17. MATHIS: You recently spoke about the top 10 risks to your clients in social media. Can you talk about the top two? WASSOM: The top two are always going to vary based on the context you're asking that question in. For example, a public company might be most concerned about violating regulations that govern the timing and form of financial information, whereas a medical organization might be worried about violating patient confidentiality or having its comments construed as medical advice. In general , though, one thing that affects almost everyone in social media is the subject of reputation -- how the things that people say online affect how others perceive them. That can take the form of third parties attacking a client -- which the internet often makes hard to trace and almost impossible to remove -- or employees saying something embarrassing that ends up hurting their own career or their employer's credibility. We got a stark reminder of that risk earlier this year, when a local PR agent mistakenly posted a profane tweet to an automotive company's Twitter feed instead of his own, costing his own job and the jobs of several others when his employer lost the company's account. A second hot topic is copyright infringement. Copyright is the law of creative expression, and it applies to almost everything we can share online, whether that's text, photos, videos, or music. The ease of sharing this content online has made infringement rampant, and the boundaries between "fair" use and infringement almost impossible to identify. Even companies who have the right to use content owned by others may get in trouble if they post it online without permission. Social media is such a problem area for copyright law that the U.S. Copyright Office recently announced that it is studying how to offer new ways of enforcing copyright online, including a "small claims court" for minor infringements. MATHIS: What would you say to a firm that insists it's gotten along very well without social media, thank you very much? WASSOM: I believe that, ten years from now, companies that don't have some form of social media presence will be as rare as those who don't use the telephone today. By that, I don't mean something simplistic like, "every company must have a Facebook page" -- although most should. Part of what will drive corporate adoption of social media is the fact, as I mentioned, that the very definition of "social media" is becoming more diffuse and flexible. But regardless of the specific social media tools that a company chooses to use, as their clients and customers increasingly take their conversations into these spaces, businesses will inevitably follow. MATHIS: Which members of a firm should be involved in social media? WASSOM: Our firm rightly recognizes that individual attorneys shouldn't be forced to have a social media presence any more than they should be pressured to adopt any other given networking tool. A lot of attorneys will never be comfortable tweeting or blogging, and that's ok. Networking is a vital activity for any successful attorney. But it is driven by personality and interests. The more natural and enjoyable our networking efforts are, the more they will succeed. For me and many others, social media provides a natural outlet. But that's not going to be true for everyone. Nor is it the only way that I network. It's still important to interact with people in person, even if you first meet them online. MATHIS: Are you available to speak on these topics with businesses or trade groups? WASSOM: Absolutely, as long as the logistical details work out. In the last year alone, I have spoken on these topics literally from one end of the country to the other, and have customized my remarks for various types of organizations. As you can imagine, however, maintaining a full-time litigation practice limits my availability, and my dates for 2012 are already filling up. So if there's a group that is interested in having me in, they may want to contact me soon. Published: Thu, Nov 24, 2011

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