Legal Risks of Social Media

According to recent research reports, http://www.kpcb.com/internettrends2011, the popularity of social media has continued to increase. In the US as of June 2011, time spent on social networking sites surpassed time spent on other internet portals. It is no wonder that businesses across all industries continually attempt to be at the forefront of this trend in order to capture the attention of these users. The hospitality industry is no different; although hotel properties were slow to see the impact of the internet on their bottom line, they have since embraced social media: blogging and tweeting about their properties, creating Facebook fan pages and YouTube channels. Perhaps because of this slow response or more likely due to the nature of the interaction with their customers (who usually share vacation information, tips, photos, etc. online) hotels need to more closely monitor the legal implications of their online presence, especially when dealing with social media sites.

How To Manage Legal Risks of Social Media, http://hotelnewsnow.com/Articles.aspx/6715/How-to-manage-legal-risks-of-social-media, clarifies some of the new legal risks inherent to social media: an employee that tweets a hotel photo with guests in the background who would rather not be seen at the property, conflict of interest with travel bloggers, navigating the different privacy laws in each region. Of course, these risks are not specific to hotels, however since the inception of social media, hotel properties have traditionally been on the other side constantly suing or threatening to sue other sites. TripAdvisor has been the primary recipient of hotel ire, last year a group of 700 hotels threatened to sue the site for slander, and most recently the site was sued by a hotel that earned the number 1 spot on TripAdvisor’s ranking of America’s dirtiest hotels. As independent hotel properties become more internet savvy, and increase their presence on social networks, they may not have the resources to mitigate the legal risks that they too will face using these channels.