So sue me
As usual, I am coming in on the tail end of a controversy. This post has to do with thoughts that started off, anyway, in an Agent Genius post.
No, I take that back. It did not start there- it started maybe 2 months or more earlier in the planning stages of REBarCamp Indiana, had an apparent climax in the post by Greg Cooper, which was answered by another post by Bill Lublin, scads of comments and the controversy is still going strong. I don’t think we have seen the fallout yet, is the thing.
On the surface it would seem that the fallout is whether Greg unloaded his angst in the proper forum- was it blame or flame? Could there have been a better way to do this? What would Cisco do?
But that’s the surface. What is under all of this is something more important.
This is Todd’s twitter profile: “Social Media Manager for the National Association of REALTORS®, and these are my personal opinions. Oh, and I’m a crummy speller. Deal with it.” He says in a comment/response to Greg Cooper’s video, “My bio is written the way it is for transparency sake. I believe in telling people where I sit before I tell them where I stand. I think it’s important for people to know who I work for. I also think it’s important to tell them that while I do work for them, this is where I intend to share my personal opinions.”
That is actually elegant- “telling people where I sit before telling them where I stand.” I love that.
As an aside- or maybe by way of meandering to the next point I had a broker once who suggested that I not be involved on Facebook because things could be taken the wrong way. At the time if he had more than suggested that, I would have told him to put a sock in it and taken my license elsewhere. How are you going to be able to reach the younger demographic without an online presence?
But even in the time that I have been involved on twitter, it has gone from being a dark smoke-and-conversation-filled room to being an outdoor cafe next to a busy street. Conversations that I wouldn’t have thought twice about putting into the stream a year ago are now reserved for Direct Message. I don’t think I have changed; the medium is more populated.
And maybe even that isn’t the point. Say I am at work and sneak onto twitter and say something that could get me in legal trouble- is my employer liable now too? If Todd answers a question about a NAR-related thing while on twitter on his personal time, who is responsible for the content of his answer? If an agent goes home after having listed the home of the client from hell and says something like, “Great. Another overpriced listing” – on his own time in his own living room into his personal twitter stream- could his broker be sued? If someone misunderstands an issue and posts publicly about it in an agent’s forum, possibly damaging someone’s reputation- who is responsible for the lawsuit that may ensue? The broker?
If you make a video on a camera that you wrote off as a business expense on last year’s tax returns is it a business video? Where is the line drawn between personal and professional opinion?
Sherry Chris asked on our radio show today whether Maya, Lesley or I had ever gone back and erased tweets. I have had some DM fails that I probably gave me third degree burns from the friction of erasing, so yes. I know that I have had moments I would have liked to erase, without a doubt.
Frankly, real estate agents are always at work. Does this mean that their brokers are always liable if their agents mess up online? How about franchise owners?
I think this is a bigger issue than just a he said- he said problem, and I do not think we will be seeing easy answers to any of these questions, given the fluid nature of new media. One thing I am fairly sure of: if you watch the stream carefully, a good portion of those tweeting after midnight in their time zones are at least somewhat tipsy, and the distance makes it harder to bring them home and tuck them safely into bed.
