Two Free e-Books on Social Media

By Ian, on March 9th, 2010

Two more downloadable social media guides that caught my eye over the last couple of weeks.

UGC and The Law

Published by moderation company Tempero, this guide helps site owners get to grips with how their social media ventures might fall foul of the law and how to avoid that happening. Relying on former audience members to generate your site’s content for free sounds like a jolly good wheeze, but the consequences of using non-contracted employees as your writers might be a spell in the slammer if you aren’t careful. And it doesn’t matter how big you are or where your company’s headquarters are located, as Google discovered recently. The most common problem is copyright violation, of course, but defamation, discrimination, incitement to bad things, privacy violations, aiding and abetting and obscenity are all perfectly possible. Most of the time common sense should be a good guide: if it is illegal offline, then it’s illegal online too; if someone asks you to take something down and gives a good reason, then you should take action or seek advice; a site owner can not rely upon the defence of being a ‘mere conduit’. Nonetheless, pretty-much anyone will discover things here that will open their eyes and lead to a spot more caution.

At 48-pages, this is quite a comprehensive overview. However, like a lot of ‘free’ legal advice, the guide tells you just enough to persuade you that you probably need a lawyer. ;-)

The Definitive Guide to B2B Social Media

The second guide comes from US marketing firm Marketo and gives a good overview of how B2B companies can use social media. These media are still somewhat under-exploited in the B2B space with the likes of Twitter and Facebook often viewed as wholly consumer-facing vehicles. The guide has a workbook format with exercises to do and model examples to help show best practise. It encompasses quick guides to particular networks, but the main meat of the book is designing strategies to help guide what content to create, how to measure it and how one might justify the necessary investment. Also 48-pages long. (Hat-tip to my friends at Velocity for their design and sub-editing work).