Sascha Lobo E-Consultancy has reported “20+ Mind-Blowing Social Media Statics” in a post reviewed by the Ice Loop on January 30. However, what becomes immediately obvious from the figures reported is that relatively very few businesses appear to be active in the social media boom that has taken place in 2009 and will grow in 2010.

Some of the figures reported are as follows:

- Facebook claims that 50 percent of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175 million users log in every 24 hours…

- Twitter now has 75 million user accounts

- LinkedIn now has over 50 million members world-wide

- Facebook has over 350 million active users globally

- Flickr hosts more than 4 billion images

- More than 35 million Facebook users update their status each day

- More than 65 million users access Facebook through mobile decides

- In late 2009, there were an average number of 27.3 million tweets per day

Where are businesses in these statistics?

Sasha Lobo states that only a paltry 700,000+ local businesses have active pages on Facebook.

For the original post, click here: http://saschalobo.posterous.com/20-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revis-3

For information on getting your business online and moving at the speed of technology, please contact the Ice Loop.

How much privacy should employees have at work?  The Ice Loop recently found a story on the Wall Street Journal reporting that employees sometimes have more privacy rights than they might expect when it comes to the corporate e-mail server, and that some courts are showing more consideration for employees who feel their employer has violated their privacy electronically.

Among the federal and state circuits in the past year, there were notable examples of disputes between employees and employers related to the employee’s Internet activities on blogs or other social networking sites. In Shaver v. Cooleemee Volunteer Fire Department, for example, plaintiff William Russell Shaver brought wrongful termination claims against his former employer, which apparently terminated him in part based on his Myspace page and the comments on a blog shared with his wife.

Another notable case last year involving an employer’s intrusion into the online affairs of its employees was that of Pietrylo v. Hillstone Restaurant Group, which actually reached a federal jury trial earlier in the summer of 2009. In a surprising verdict, the Pietrylo jury found in favor of the employees Pietrylo and Marino, and against employer Hillstone, for violating the Federal Stored Communications Act and New Jersey Wire Tapping and Electronic Surveillance laws.

The facts in Pietrylo were as follows: Hillstone operated a Houston’s restaurant in Hackensack, N.J. Hillstone’s employees created a Myspace group the purpose of which was to “vent about any BS we deal with [at] work without any outside eyes spying in on us…Let the s— talking begin.” After the formation of the group, one employee accessed the site in the presence of a manager, who then informed other managers about the site. Given that the Myspace group site included sexual remarks about restaurant management and other offensive content about customers, drugs, and violence, Pietrylo and Marino were fired, and eventually filed suit against Houston’s bringing a litany of claims.

Although the jury award in Pietrylo was not significant, Pietrylo provides employers with a firm caution about intruding into the personal affairs of their employees online.

For the original WSJ story, please click here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125859862658454923.html?mod=rss_Today’s_Most_Popular

To obtain more information about handling employees who blog or engage in other social networking activities, please contact Ice Miller or info@theiceloop.com.

Social networking site Tagged.com has been awarded more than $200,000 in a default judgment against Erik Vogeler, who spammed thousands of Tagged members by sending them unsolicited messages with links to an adult dating Web site.

In a ruling issued earlier this week, a U.S. District Court Judge in the northern district of California found Vogeler guilty of sending messages to 6,079 Tagged users and assessed damages of $25 per violation for a total of $151,975. Court also ordered Vogeler to pay Tagged $50,000 in attorneys’ fees and to cease sending commercial e-mails through Tagged.com.

For more details, click here: http://blog.tagged.com/

Tagged states it is the third largest social networking site in the U.S, with 80 million members world-wide.

The Center for Media, Crime, and Justice has reported that a New York woman, Ashley Sullivan, is in jail partly because of her Facebook posts. Sullivan was the driver in a car accident that took place while she was drunk, which resulted in the death of her boyfriend. About a month after the crash, Sullivan apparently went to Florida and posted photos and status-updates on her Facebook page, commenting “Drunk in Florida.” The Judge, Matthew J. Murphy, III, found the posts “troubling” and issued a jail probation sentence for her behavior.

Full story here: http://thecrimereport.org/2010/01/29/social-media-sentencing-facebook-post-leads-to-dwi-jail-term/

News sites have reported a tell-all by an anonymous Facebook whistlerblower, which has described various privacy issues with the popular social networking site. According to the stories read by the Ice Loop, the unnamed whistleblower has alleged that everything a user does on the site is permanently stored and saved and completely accessible to Facebook staff members, and that anything done on the site (like uploading photos, clicking on a profile, updating status, and changing profile information) is recorded on Facebook’s servers.

The full story is here: http://www.switched.com/2010/01/15/anonymous-employee-reveals-ugly-details-of-facebooks-inner-work/

For information about privacy concerns involving social media networking sites, please contact any one of the Ice Miller attorneys involved in Ice Miller’s Internet, Technology, and Social Media Practice, or info@theiceloop.com.

The Ice Loop has obtained a copy of Coca-Cola’s new social media policy. Although it is a simple policy (3 pages long), it appears to be practical and based on common sense. According to Adam Brown, head of social media at Coca-Cola, their 10 principles of social media wisdom are as follows:

1. Be Certified in the Social Media Certification Program.
2. Follow our Code of Business Conduct and all other Company policies.
3. Be mindful that you are representing the Company.
4. Fully disclose your affiliation with the Company.
5. Keep records.
6. When in doubt, do not post.
7. Give credit where credit is due and don’t violate others’ rights.
8. Be responsible to your work.
9. Remember that your local posts can have global significance.
10. Know that the Internet is permanent.

The full post and download are available here: http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/coca-cola-launches-new-social-media-policy/

Companies do not have to be as large as Coca-Cola to feel concerned about social media sites and feel a need to implement social media policies for their employees. If you who would like to prepare a new social media policy for your company or simply learn more about your options, Ice Miller is glad to assist.

Angie’s List and its members can celebrate a victory at the hands of a contractor who sued Angie’s List several years ago.  The lawsuit was triggered by the contractor’s disagreement about certain postings by Angie’s List Members on the Angie’s List website, www.angieslist.com, concerning work performed by the contractor.  The decision issued by a District of Columbia Court came after years of contentious litigation in which the contractor, Stephen Sieber, and his business, SCS Contracting Group, complained that Angie’s List, some of Angie’s List’s members, and the Washington Post financially ruined SCS and Sieber.  The Washington Post had published articles about Sieber’s dispute with Angie’s List and its members.  Sieber claimed damages in excess of $60 million. The Court exonerated Angie’s List, its members and the Washington Post on all issues. A copy of the decision can be accessed here.    

            Angie’s List was one of the first Internet sites to afford protection to consumers via on-line Internet ratings from other consumers.  In holding that Angie’s List was immune from defamation suits based on the postings of third parties on its interactive Internet site, the Court validated Angie’s List Business Model, which is a cornerstone of consumer protection on the Internet.

            For nearly fifteen years, Angie’s List has helped millions of consumers make informed decisions as to whom they should hire for various services (from plumbers and painters to dentists and dermatologists).  Today, Angie’s List members can research, rate, and review service providers across 450 different categories in more than 120 cities around the United States.  Angie’s List encourages honest assessment of service providers, so with more than 40,000 reports being submitted each month, not all of the comments contain positive comments about service providers.  The fact is Angie’s List’s members rely on each other to provide unbiased and reliable reviews (good or bad).  It is this type of assessment by Angie’s List members that adds the real value to the site for other Angie’s List members. 

            Angie’s List has developed numerous mechanisms to promote honest, reliable and valuable feedback.  For example, Angie’s List prohibits service providers from submitting reports about themselves or their competitors.  It also allows service providers to register with the website so they are notified when a report about them is submitted, and it gives the service provider an opportunity to respond, as long as the service provider follows an established protocol.  The result has been a website that allows consumers to make more informed decisions about who they hire and allows service providers the opportunity to monitor customers’ comments. 

            It is not surprising that some service providers disagree with comments by their customers.   In Sieber’s case, he charged (among many other things) that Angie’s List should be held liable for postings by its members about his business and also for refusing to publish his responses.  In rejecting those claims, the Court stated that:

It is important to specify that Angie’s List is immune from defamation suits based on the postings of third parties on its interactive Internet site, according to the federal law known as the Communications Decency Act of 1996, 47 U.S.C. §230 (c) (1). This is why the plaintiffs have no basis for suing based upon anything posted on Angie’s List.

The federal law commonly known as the Communications Decency Act provides that a website operator is not considered the “speaker” of any information placed on its website by another person, assuming the Internet operator complies with the definitions and requirements of the Act. Here, the content was on Angie’s List, but was provided by Angie’s List members. 

            It is also important to Angie’s List that its members know that they are protected by the law for making truthful statements on the Angie’s List website. Angie’s List believes that its members should feel vindicated in this multi-year struggle that Angie’s List protected their opinions as expressed on the website.

            The Court also rejected Sieber’s claims that Angie’s List wrongfully denied him the “right” to publish a response.  The Court clarified that legally Sieber had no legal “right” to a response, even if he conformed with applicable Angie’s List’s policies concerning responses by contractors.  In this instance, Sieber failed to comply with Angie’s List policies and therefore his response was not posted.  Angie’s List did send a notice to its members about Sieber’s company and published an article in its Member’s Magazine that included some of Sieber’s comments, but the Court found that these comments were also not defamatory. 

            In today’s internet marketplace, an increasing number of companies are providing a website forum where customers or members can post information and share their thoughts or experiences.  This recent ruling validates that the Communications Decency Act provides immunity to website operators who operate within the requirements of the Act.

        For more information about this recent Court decision or about how the Communications Decency Act might impact your business, please contact Michael Wukmer, Melanie Harris, or George Gasper at Ice Miller. For information about Angie’s List, please contact Cheryl Reed at cherylr@angieslist.com or (317) 396-9134.

           This article was originally reported on Ice Miller’s e-Newsletter, located here.

TechNewsWorld has published an article called “Creepy Ways your Social Media Data Can Be Used,” asserting that most social networking users have no idea how their information is being used.

According to TechNewsWorld, there are signs that companies — from financial service firms to affiliate marketers — are targeting social media for new purposes. Roger Thompson, chief research scientist with AVG, for example, believes his credit card company has incorporated data from his Facebook account into his credit card file. He told of an incident in which he had to verify information about himself for security purposes, and one of the questions was about his daughter-in-law — information that the bank didn’t get from him and is only publicly available on Facebook.

Some credit card companies and financial service companies reportedly are developing algorithms based on an account applicant’s online friends — the theory being that deadbeats tend to associate with one another. Other stories focus on shady affiliate marketers getting their way onto a member’s account and then sending sales pitches and product recommendations to their networks, supposedly from them.

These practices are not necessarily mainstream — but the general trend is clear: Companies are recognizing the treasure trove of data sitting on social networks, and are beginning to experiment with it.

“2009 was a watershed year for social networks, with the numbers of people joining or expanding their use of these sites,” Dallas Lawrence, chair of the digital and social media practice group at Levick Strategic Communications, told the E-Commerce Times.

“The next stage, I believe, will be companies taking all this information [and] combining it with new search tools in order to sort through the trillions of data points available,” Lawrence said.

For the full story, click here: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/Creepy-Ways-Your-Social-Media-Data-Can-Be-Used-69158.html

The European Patent Office (EPO) has recently announced that it is launching a new follow-up survey to determine how the public does, or does not, use available patent information. As noted within the EPO’s announcement (link HERE), the last survey was performed in 2002-03, and identified that 70 percent of surveyed companies in Europe actually didn’t even use patent information. This new survey will be carried out in all of the current EPO member states (current list available HERE) plus the United States. According to the EPO, “Our target group is the innovation sector at large – including industry, public sector research, and academia. We are not especially focusing on patent applicants or patent attorneys, although some may get into the study because of the randomized sampling procedure.” The private surveyor plans to conduct all surveys via telephone, which will be available in 25 different languages.

The Ice Loop has read the results of the 2010 Global Online Consumer Security Survey undertaken by RSA.  The RSA’s work was reported in a recent article by Computer Business Review, and essentially finds that online users are less likely to share information on social networks. 

According to RSA, nearly two in three (65 percent) people, who join social networking Web sites each day, are less likely to interact or share information due to growing security concerns, according to a survey by security firm RSA.

The survey showed that four out of five (81 percent) people using social networking Web sites had concern with the safety of their personal information online, as social networking Web sites become a hotbed for online criminals.

Consumers using online banking Web sites (86 percent) had more concerns with personal information theft than those using healthcare portals (64 percent) and government Web sites (68 percent). As a result more than half of consumers are less likely to interact on these Web sites, the firm said.

Consumers agreed that their identities should be better protected than a simple username and password on social networking (59 percent), healthcare (64 percent), government (70 percent) and online banking (80 percent) Web sites.

For the RSA Report, please click here: www.rsa.com/document.asp?doc_id=10665

For CBR’s story, click here:  http://media.cbronline.com/news/online_users_loath_to_share_information_on_social_networks_200110

To help obtain more information about privacy or security concerns with online sites, please contact info@theiceloop.com or any one of the attorneys in the Information, Technology, and Social Media Practice at Ice Miller.