Have you considered what the legal team will say?

Oh dear. The lawyers are getting involved. So you’ve got this great idea, you want to get closer to your customers, get them talking about you, with you, to you… You are thinking about building out a social networking proposition, leveraging your branding to ensure traction and reason for people to visit. Let customers upload videos and pictures of themselves using your products. Hey! You even decide to let your customers build your taxonomy through tagging. Lots of user generated content all around your product. Your brand.

And then the lawyers get involved.

You discover this is not going to be a uTube or a Wikipedia. It is not going to be the wisdom of the crowd. It’s got to be moderated first. And not any old moderation.

The legal team are insisting that all content be moderated by the Corporation before it goes public. Now that may not sound as bad as all that- some sort of moderation was always going to be inevitable – you want to be able to pull anything that is obviously inappropriate or damaging to the brand. But moderating everything before it goes live? Suddenly the proposition becomes expensive. Who is going to do the moderation? And the customer experience becomes compromised. What sort of social network would it be if it didn’t have immediacy? Any Twitter functionality is clearly going to be out. So before you get too excited about your great web 2.0 idea, think about how those party poopers the lawyers who are going to get rich out of killing you dream.