Developer of Agent2.0 - a model for social media in real estate. Read more at ExecutiveConversationsInRealEstate.com
I read a recent article about how the journalism community was providing bloggers training on how to avoid lawsuits as citizen journalists. http://www.examiner.com/a-1442421~Training_helps_bloggers_hone_professionalism.html (don't know how to make this a link - sorry) The article reports that there have been more than 100 legal judgements rendered against bloggers in the last three years and awards of over $17M made. The judgements were made 60% of the time for defamation, 25% for copyright violations and 10% involved a violation of privacy. I'll suggest that when you are blogging, or have decided to have someone on your team blog for your company, you need to be aware and refer to a simple set of guidelines. These are just a starting place for your consideration, but you may want the guidelines to read something like this - 1) Do not defame competitors, associates, prospective clients and current clients; might be best to just not talk about them at all - I never do 2) Do not use content you have not have rights to; this includes pictures and images, but also includes writing from other blogs and news articles. You can use a reference from another writers work, but you must attribute their words to them 3) Do not write / comment about items / issues that might otherwise be considered confidential to a person. How you phrase these to your people is up to you, but I do not think you cannot afford to not participate in social media in real estate today.
