Over the past two-plus years, we’ve all noticed the growth in the personal and professional use of social networking sites. Many of us who work in communications, marketing, or electronic publishing fields have set up our own personal accounts on a number of sites. Some University communications professionals have even developed sites for their units, events, or special interest groups.
As University Relations works to create a new branding policy and update the existing WWW Publishing Policy, we are asking some hard questions.
What role does social networking play for any individual unit on the U campus?
How does the use of these sites – the way they look and what they say - portray our image or brand?
When and where do our policies conflict with the terms of service on various social networking sites?
How does social networking fit into a unit’s overall marketing plan and staffing resources?
University Relations is actively researching the terms of service on the most popular social networking sites and will be meeting with a representative from the Office of the General Council to help us interpret these terms along with our policies.
We are asking communications professionals at other universities how they’ve handled social networking on their campus.
We hope to engage our U of M colleagues in our exploring the purposes and goals of social networking sites.
I know that we’re already behind in this realm and that answers probably won’t come as quickly as we’d all like. Keep checking this blog for updates. Also, follow me on Twitter @goldiegopher, where I hope to tweet about things I find along the way in my research. And most certainly, please post your comments on the blog.
- Kathy
Thanks for looking into this --- looking forward to what you learn!
My one recommendation / hope, aimed more at the General Counsel, expands on what I commented on earlier today (at UMCF Web 2.0 half-day). At the U, we hunger for and welcome University content and messaging in print, TV, and radio venues (all of which copyright their content), yet we seem skittish about similar terms when they regard online publishing and social networks.
So my question is, how similar / dissimilar is this? If faculty happily publish their findings in a journal, which copyrights the article, then should we mind that a social network might also have some claim on our online content? And if so, why, and how can we accommodate such concerns without needing to avoid these online venues?
The fact is, the U already publishes content in hundreds of media venues that it does not own, operate, or claim copyright to. So we should learn from that precedent, and see how social media terms of service and copyright issues compare.
College of Design units including alumni relations and Goldstein Museum are interested in or already have posted images in Flickr. Is it true that once images are posted on the site that we lose rights to them and they belong to Flickr? Looking for guidance on this social networking site too. Thanks.
Based on a quick review of the terms of service on the Flickr site, they say they don't claim ownership of any images that are uploaded to their servers.
As you probably know, image downloads can be done by anyone who has access to the images, so if you're concerned about that, you would need to limit access to the images - an option that's available in Flickr.
Our office is still working with the OGC to make sure we understand all the legal ramifications involved with using social networking sites. We're working toward having the ability to use these tools, not trying to keep people from their use.