I'm very pleased to welcome George LeBrun to the PMN family. As you may already know, last week we announced that George along with Bill Hanifin joined the new PMN advisory board. I’m very excited to have these two highly successful thought leaders on the board as we continue to build out additional benefits for our members. Both George and Bill will also be regular contributors to our blog.

Up first is George. Last week George and I spoke about some of the emerging challenges for marketers given the growth of new channels such as social networks and the micro-blogging site Twitter. Given George's experience as a lawyer I asked him to share our conversation on the topic with our members. The below post is a topic both George and I will be spending a lot more time on in the weeks and months ahead and it is an important one for marketers to not only acknowledge but address. We hope it gets you thinking and if we can be of any service, please do not hesitate to reach out. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming both George and Bill to the PMN Family.

Enjoy,
Michael
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Participation Blurs The Line Between Who Owns Traditional Corporate IP
By George LeBrun

Large public companies have been struggling with a variety of issues around social media. One of the more recent to come to light is more of a legal nature. Most employees sign agreements that anything they think of or work on during their employment belongs to the company. It's typical "work for hire" contract language. But as we know, social media changes everything. So, if I blog or twitter as part of my job and I amass a large group of followers and then I leave my job - who do my followers belong to, me or the company? The company would argue that the followers belong to them and that the list of people is their IP, but what happens if the lawyers try to enforce that. Even a legitimate legal claim could backfire on them causing severe brand dilution.

When companies are trying to establish their corporate policies around the social media, they need to stop taking a "this is how we do it" attitude. The social web requires rethinking all of your traditional business rules and practices, it no longer matters how you did business last year, last month, or yesterday, but how you will do business tomorrow. This particular issue affects multiple business units and raises many questions. Should HR and legal be discussing re-writing their employment contracts? Can one agreement cover all situations? The company can argue that they provided the platform, but was the employee speaking for the company or him/herself, was blogging part of the job description, was it being done on company time? Should companies have plans and policies in place to purchase the list of these social followers? Does the company suffer from brand dilution when an employee leaves a company and no longer provides that communication between the company and its customers?

These are just a few of the questions that come to mind as more and more companies like DELL and Zappos start to encourage a large number of their employees to participate in the conversation with their customers...And what happens, if anything, to high-affinity brands like Apple who have a policy of not allowing employees to communicate in any way with its customer base. It is a hot issue for sure and one that Michael Della Penna and I are tackling head on as part of SuiteDialog/Rule 13's social media practices. For more information on SuiteDialog & Rule 13 visit the websites or drop us an email at info@thepmn.org.