Introducing our July Book Club selection, Navigating Social Media Legal Risks: Safeguarding Your Business by Robert McHale. Are you aware of the number of laws and guidelines which employers need to be adhere to when creating their social media policies?  Do you glaze over social networking sites Terms of Service (TOS) when creating brand pages? Do you know the differences between a contest, sweepstakes and a lottery and do you know how to protect your business when running these with a social media campaign? 

"Robert McHale, Esq. is the founding member of R McHale Law (rmchale.com), a full-service law firm whose corporate practice represents clients on a wide variety of IT and intellectual property law matters, including privacy and data security, trademark, copyright, trade secrets, technology licensing, and other proprietary protections. By leveraging his business instinct, technical insight, and legal experience, Robert helps companies develop legal strategies that best promote their business objectives. His areas of focus include general corporate law, business litigation, web/mobile applications, online marketing, new media, and Internet and e-commerce technology." 

Robert provides a single go-to resource for everything your business needs to know about compliance including, how to legally run social media contests and sweepstakes, copyrights, brandjacking, COPPA, FTC Endorsement Guidelines, defemation and more.  There are also previous case laws sprinkled throughout the book, which is important in understanding how the FTC and respective agencies enforce these guidelines.

We've heard the stories about the FTC penalizing corporations like Sony BMG, with $1 million dollar fines for not complying with COPPA guidelines. Can your business afford to lose $1 million for oversight or lack of knowledge? 

In an effort to continue discussion and connect our Social Media Club community with our featured Book Club authors, we are hosting a complimentary webinar on Tuesday, July 31st at 2pm EST with author Robert McHale.

In Robert's webinar, you'll get a taste of the following,

•   Craft legally compliant social media promotions, contests, sweepstakes, and advertising campaigns

•   Write effective social media policies and implement best practices for governance

•   Ensure the security of sensitive company and customer information

•   Properly monitor and regulate the way your employees use social media

•   Avoid high-profile social media mishaps that can instantly damage reputation, brand equity, and goodwill, and create massive potential liability

•   Avoid unintentional employment and labor law violations in the use of social media in pre-employment screening

•   Manage legal issues associated with game-based marketing, “virtual currencies,” and hyper-targeting

•   Manage the legal risks of user-generated content (UGC)

•   Protect your trademarks online, and overcome brandjacking and cybersquatting

•   Understand the e-discovery implications of social media in lawsuits

via Amazon

About Social Media Book Club

The Social Media Book Club features social media's most innovative thought leaders, who have written books that help our global community learn, improve and share valuable knowledge. 

We have selected several titles we will be introducing to you at the beginning of each month and ask several of our Professional members and chapter leaders to help review the monthly titles.

Thanks to our partnership with publishers like McGraw-Hill, Wiley, Pearson and Que Publishing, Social Media Club officially launched a monthly book club in March 2011, and have already featured titles such as, Wikibrands, Content Rules, Curation Nation, Get Seen, Social Media Anaytics, Maximizing Linkedin for Sales and Social Media Marketing, The Social Media Strategist and Optimize, with complimentary webinars made available to our SMC members.

Get Involved

As a Social Media Club Professional Membership benefit, we invite Professional members to be part of our Social Media Book Club. If you are a Professional Member and interested in receiving, reviewing and sharing your feedback on upcoming titles with the rest of the SMC community, please email Jessica [Jessica at socialmediaclub dot org] for details.

To join the Social Media Book of the Month Club and prepare for our upcoming webinar, pick up your copy of Navigating Social Media Legal Risks: Safeguarding Your Business (Que Biz-Tech) on Amazon.

*Disclosure, this is an affiliate link and Social Media Club will most likely earn $0.02 if you order this book. Think of it as a way to help fund our media literacy programs!

Be sure to follow the Social Media Book Club hashtag on Twitter to share your main takeaways or follow the conversation, #smcbooks.