Who owns your peeps?

Have you thought about who owns your followers?
As social media and the people that join social networks becomes more and more a part of the work place, employers are being forced to consider the impact. Some employers have seen (or considered) only bad effects, while others have benefited unwittingly from positive impacts without fully understanding why.

In his recent article titled ”Who gets custody of Twitter when an employee quits?” attorney and blogger Venkat Balasubramani follows two recent court cases where two different employers (Ardis Health and PhoneDog) have spent enormous sums in attorney fees and lost valuable social capital to sue former employees for taking their large twitter accounts with them, when they left their respective employers. In these two cases, the courts sided with the employers. However, that may not always be the case – and besides that, it is the court of public opinion that is often more impacting than the legal justice system when it comes to social media issues.

Some interesting questions come to mind:

1. Who owns the twitter account? a) The creator and builder – or – b) The employer upon whose equipment the account was created and managed?
2. If an employer retains a Twitter account after an employee leaves, which that employee was the builder and author of, are the followers going to sit idly waiting for a new employee to begin tweeting, or are they going to naturally run to follow the author to his/her new account?
3. What is the spot value of a follower of a twitter account?

In the interesting case of PhoneDog v Noah Kravitz, the employer asserted a ludicrous spot value of $2.50 per follower – on a twitter account that had 17,000 followers. This seems ridiculous, since all of the studies show that people primarily follow personality, not product or brand, on twitter. In rare cases where a “brand personality” has been created, such as the case of the Old Spice ads featuring a paid actor – there is an obvious brand ownership.

The question begs: Did Kravitz build that following, or did the PhoneDog brand attract them? Only time, not the court, will tell; But my money would be on Kravitz. As anyone who has seriously attempted to build a following can tell you, it’s no simple task to build and maintain a 5 digit following on Twitter! AND more importantly – what difference does it make?? If PhoneDog puts any other employee on that account, there is no guarantee that the followers will be motivated to continue following or to do anything financially beneficial for PhoneDog.

On the other hand, I’m going out on a limb here, it seems that a savvy company that understands the value of a person who can build a 5 digit following will employ Kravitz to join them and blog for them. I may completely wrong, but I’m going to say that one year from now Kravitz will have a new account with at least 125% of the followers he once had at PhoneDog and someone will be paying him to do it.

A Lose-Lose Proposition?
At Gillie, we believe there is no way to quantify the value of the loss in “social capital” that PhoneDog will suffer as a result of suing an employee for taking an account that he built while working there. But, my guess is that the cost will vastly out-weigh the sum of the spot value they placed on the followers that Kravitz was taking with him. Any new employee who is a serious blogger or tweeter will be crazy to go to work at an employer who is going to sue them – unless they can finagle an advance “hold harmless” agreement in their favor.

All of this could have been avoided, if PhoneDog had:

1. Put a social media ownership policy, written into the employment agreement, in place ahead of this situation and more clearly defining the parameters.
2. Considered the value of this employee and his 17,000 followers before he left – if he had really built an account worth $42,500 to PhoneDog, perhaps they should have found a way to motivate Kravitz to stick around and do something more valuable with it!
3. Considered how to keep corporate social media accounts under the company’s control, if they were truly considering that to be “PhoneDog’s” Twitter account, from the beginning. There are ways to ensure that the employees don’t/can’t walk away with the passwords to social media accounts.

What these cases reveal is the fact that corporations still have yet to fully regard how consequential the new social culture can be to their business. Social media is here to stay – especially in the business world where computers and mobile devices are part and parcel of the business cycle. Now is the time to consider these issues – before you find your company fighting a lose-lose lawsuit.

Solution Proposition

At Social Gillie, we believe in creating Win-Win-Win propositions. Social Gillie has already thought through these impacts and is able to help your company gain from the new social media culture with a social business plan that both benefits and enhances your company’s productivity – rather than diminishes it. Contact us today to discuss the Social Gillie solutions available for your company.