| Common Forms of Social Media |
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By Karen L. Garrett, partner, Stinson Morrison Hecker LLP, Kansas City, Mo. This article accompanies the main article, “Social media damage control: Why your bank must plan now” Disclaimer: This article provides general information only. It is not intended to be a comprehensive summary of the law or to treat exhaustively the subjects covered. This information does not constitute legal advice or opinion. The term “social media” actually covers some very different internet concepts. Among them: • Social networks/communities. Social networks are intended to link participants in interactive ways for personal or business purposes. Facebook and LinkedIn are primary examples. Facebook claims more than 400 million active users—and more than 50% of those active users access Facebook on any given day to share information. LinkedIn is a network of professionals, providing a forum for meeting and collaborating with other members for professional purposes, and currently claims over 60 million members. • Bulletin boards/message boards/forums. These are online discussion sites, offering an electronic location for posting information/messages to a community. Bankersonline.com is an example of a widely used bulletin board/forum site, in which experts post content, and users are able to ask questions and interact with one another through message posts. Bankersonline claims on its website that more than 240,000 unique banker users visit the site monthly. (ABA maintains a members-only compliance community, the ABA Compliance Network. Bankers from member banks can access the signup page at http://www.aba.com/members+only/regulatory/complnetwork.htm.) • Blogs. A blog contains regular entries which may include bits of information or commentary. Blogs can be personal—sharing an individual’s thoughts or experience, or can be a business blog maintained by a business for marketing, branding or public relations purposes. (One example is the ABA’s “Credit Union Watch” blog maintained by Keith Leggett, which contains Dr. Leggett’s comments and insights on credit unions.) Twitter is partially a blog and partially a social network. Strictly speaking it is a micro-blog, which permits users to send their friends and other followers short (in no more than 140 characters) bursts of information (called “tweets”). The Pew Research Center reported on Oct. 21, 2009 that 19% of all online adults use Twitter or a similar status update service. • File sharing sites. A file sharing site, such as YouTube and Flickr allows users to post video or image content on particular topics of interest. While these sites originally mimicked traditional one-way media, their use as a two-way forum for social commentary is growing. Disclaimer: This article provides general information only. It is not intended to be a comprehensive summary of the law or to treat exhaustively the subjects covered. This information does not constitute legal advice or opinion. Set as favorite Bookmark
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