Social Network Marketing — Legal Pitfalls

The use of social media websites for marketing is growing fast. However, this is new ground for many marketers and, as it matures, certain legal issues will emerge. In this article, I look at a few potential legal pitfalls and how to avoid them. Because social network marketing involves the publishing or broadcast of online content, many existing, traditional media law apply to content on social media websites. Copyright is the big one, with “fair use” on the forefront. Copyright law protects any type of content whether it is text, audio, video — whether or not an actual copyright statement exists on the content. To keep yourself safe, always quote sources. Even if you don’t use a statement word-for-worth, it’s better to attribute statements to known sources. Services such as copyscape offer website owners and web content providers the ability to check their writing against other content on the web. But, it won’t check older, or archived, content that doesn’t exist on the web. Just because content has been checked with copyscape doesn’t mean it wasn’t plagiarized.

Technorati Tags: Legal, marketing, network, Pitfalls, Social

Tagged as: Legal, marketing, network, Pitfalls, Social