Legal news and trends for Canadian in-house counsel and c-suite executives
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50893
BUSINESS CASE would find increased interest or concern for that matter about blog- ging. I think the environment is changing that rapidly in terms of the presence of blogs and bloggers, and the credibility they have." — JANE SHAPIRO, FLEISHMAN-HILLARD CANADA far less formal in these spaces and anyone responding for your company should be fluent in it. • Monitor the web. Figure out where your company is regularly talked about and what the interested blogs or chatrooms are. If there isn't a place where your company is currently discussed, where are the likely places for it to be talked about should a crisis erupt? Also find the sites with the most influence; don't waste your time monitoring comments from someone without credibility or audience. If you don't narrow the field, you will be overwhelmed when trying to monitor web presence. • Set guidelines for employees for their activity online. "If the ground rules are clear, it avoids a lot of serious situations down the road with employees saying, 'I didn't know that I couldn't do this,'" Shapiro says. McConchie suggests in-house lawyers compile a catastrophic smear plan, "So that if something happens that involves a wide- scale, really damaging attack on reputation, you've got a team identified ahead of time to respond to it." McConchie says you should keep the following in mind when assembling a team: • Include a public relations consultant experienced in crisis management. • The group should contain a small internal team of individuals at the management level who have the authority to take action after consulting with the PR crisis manager. • From a legal perspective, if you don't have the expertise in- house, get counsel experienced in dealing with disparaging in- ternet expression. "If it's a serious attack, you're not going to have the time to put that team together," he says. "That team should have a proto- col, at a minimum, describing what factors it's going to look at in the context of the corporation's particular situation . . . and what mechanism it's going to employ. "It's just the speed with which information can be disseminated on the internet that makes it essential, I think, to have this facil- ity available." One common nugget of advice regarding the threat of the cybersmear is the need to monitor you company's online pres- ence. For some companies, a Google e-mail alert (www.google. com/alerts) of any online content that refers to your company will be enough. But other companies, such as Collective Intellect, offer ser- vices that can go much further in keeping tabs on your brand. Darren Kelly, vice president of business development at Col- 44 FEBRU AR Y 2008 C ANADIAN Lawyer INHOUSE lective Intellect, says the company offers a real-time, persistent search for references of your company on all media. Blogs, on- line message boards, and social networking sites — all com- monly known as "social media" — are included. Companies are alerted when there's some kind of anomaly in activity. Kelly says about a dozen companies are using the service, but a lot more are thinking of adopting it. "I usually get calls when something hits the fan. Then they become clients right away," he says from the company's Boulder, Colo., head office. The service ranges in price from thousands to tens of thou- sands of dollars monthly, depending on the level of tracking required, says Kelly. "Social media is a critically important part of media today. There are large pieces of society which no longer watch televi- sion commercials, no longer engage in things like reading news- papers. There's a whole younger demographic which communi- cates only in social media," says Kelly. "If you don't have your ear to ground about that world, you're missing out on major parts of the conversation and you need to be engaged in it." While many companies fear the corporate cybersmear, Mi- chael Eisen, chief legal officer for Microsoft Canada, says the mammoth technology company's Canada wing hasn't been hit with such an attack, and he's not preoccupied with the issue. "There's no question that our intellectual property folks are constantly on the lookout for people taking liberties with our trademarks, or misrepresenting a relationship with Microsoft, or infringing our copyrights," he says. "We're also on top of the news and are aware of things that are being said, but haven't bumped into anything outside of the intellectual property area that warranted a response on our part." He suggests that Canadian values impact his approach to comments posted online. "Within certain limits, we are a country that champions free- dom of speech and things are going to be said that you don't like," says Eisen. While not all companies are equally susceptible to the threat of a cybersmear, McConchie says companies in the service, fi- nancial, and consumer goods sectors of the economy are most at risk. And don't stall on putting a plan in place, he urges. "Until it happens to you, it's an easy thing to ignore. You should check the levies before the storm hits," he says. "Because if you're not solid, you're just going to be wiped out." IH "I think if we were to go back and do that same survey today, we