Despite tweeting to millions every day, many companies are unaware of the legal implications of social. Chris Scott explains risk mitigation. 

Communication professionals, and particularly those who started their careers as journalists, will understand how seriously publishing groups take the risk of legal action. As a young journalist 13 years ago I recall trooping from Hammersmith to Farringdon for what was, in hindsight, a highly ironic training session based on a publisher and its insurers seeking to avoid the risk of a libel writ.

This being the days before Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, my audience base was little over 10,000 print readers. Irrespective, I was still required to renew this training every six months. Compare that audience against those now enjoyed by leading social businesses – Tesco has 1.4m Facebook likes. At the time of writing British Airways has tweeted 115,000 times and has 365,000 followers. Sir Martin Sorrell has just under 100,000 people subscribed to his ‘Influencer’ bulletins on LinkedIn.

Just like the publishers of trade magazines before them, those engaged in debate online are also publishers in the eyes of the law. Yet despite publishing to thousands and millions, it is striking how seldom businesses seek to understand, let alone mitigate, the risks they encounter from publishing. With the 2013 Defamation Act making clear the responsibility and procedures for dealing with online comments made by others on social media you control, how many of those at the frontline of viewing and editing online content feel they have the expertise to deal with complaints if and when they arise?

Those who encourage customers to interact with them on social media can inadvertently cause themselves further problems. Likewise, a business can be held liable for the social media activity of its employees during the course of their work.There’s an additional issue for businesses when it comes to social media: how they are affected by content created about them or directed to them. It is generally the job of communications professionals to monitor what is being said on social media and to try to deal with issues that arise as soon as possible. Yet responsibilities can become blurred.

Last year, Schillings undertook some research entitled Reputation Resilience that looked at how communications professionals and lawyers work together. The research suggested a friction that stems from competing obligations to be fast and to be considered. We see this friction played out every day when we advise big businesses, and a recurring catalyst is social media with its built-in demand for instant reaction.

But this need not be the case. As professionals we are all seeing attitudes to social media mature and businesses need to put in place processes and training that not only identify who is responsible for publishing but who is responsible for identifying and escalating problems.It is not that hard for a business to understand who publishes and what they publish, but internally those teams and individuals need to cooperate in the same way they would with any form of communication. Understanding who publishes and what they publish instantly gains a degree of control for the business and lets the risk be assessed.

Chris Scott is a partner at Schillings. He focuses on media relations, risk and defamation law