Re blog redirection – I agree with the general point you’re making, but it’s worth remembering that when Paul Waugh left the Evening Standard the last blog post from him on the paper’s site was about his new job with links to his new online presence. I thought it was suitably gracious of the Standard to be happy to publish that story.

Very good article. The ownership of social media properties within media is a bit of a hot potato.

Ultimately, I believe that the account belongs to the BBC and they should have the rules in place so all parties understand this.

What a lot of media folk conveniently forget is that they wouldn’t have the followers if they weren’t on the platform that they are on. Many broadcasters have spent millions building and promoting their stations and individuals benefit from that investment.

@Mark very gracious indeed – although they were certainly not obliged to do so! I’d love to know whether there was even a debate about whether they could claim the account or whether they let it go without a fight…

Of course, what’s really happened isn’t a transfer of ownership from BBC to ITV, but a reassertion of ownership by Laura Kuenssberg – which must now set a precedent for others tweeting in a professional capacity.

hmm for the time being the subject seems to be a bit of a grey area.

I agree partially that the BBC would own the Twitter account as they work there. However as an individual you have worked hard to get where you are. You worked your way into that job role. So it’s your account.

Simply. Lessons should be learned for the future. By putting [companyname] into your twitter username is like saying you speak for the BBC. When most people in fact speak for themselves. It’s ok to have your job title advertised in your bio.. as long as it’s clear it’s you who is tweeting and not the company.

If you want the company name in your twitter username then it’s for company business only. The company would then by rights own the account.

@Rhys I agree. Maybe the lesson is simply “don’t include your employer’s name in your Twitter handle”

Always – business and personal profiles. Simple, sensible and understandable. Professionals owe this to both their followers and their employer, and its inevitable the ‘employee’ should have different interests to the inidividual – wether you choose to broadcast these is up to them.

I wonder what would happen with F1 commentator Jake Humphrey’s account if say ITV or Sky got the rights to F1 broadcast and Jake was enticed to another broadcaster. His account has over 300K followers now and is built on his BBC presenting job, but only mentions BBC in the bio of his profile. Was jakehumphreyf1 cleverly thought out or just shorter than bbcjakehumphrey?

Interesting argument. I think on this occasion the account could’ve easily belonged to the BBC if they had laid that out in their Social Media Guidelines. I wonder how long you could get away with having BBC in your name before being asked to remove it.

I use twitter as a journalist and list my BBC experience in my bio, however views remain my own.

If you think it’s all about YOU, don’t put the corporate in your account name.

@Brian the point about Jake Humphrey is well made – my guess would be based on the situation above that he would definitely be allowed to take those 300k followers elsewhere. The biggest issue here is that if you’re an employer and have individuals tweeting officially on your behalf, it’s got to be advisable to have some sort of policy on whether that feed is owned by the individual or the organisation…

No question the account should have stayed with Laura, as it did. If Twitter accounts were default ‘owned’ by employers be assured they would be entirely uninteresting. It’s personalities and the personal nature of Twitter accounts that make them worth following. If it’s RSS you want then sign up to a BBC RSS feed

I blogged about this last month.

Looking at Laura’s feed, it’s 100% work focussed. There are no personal tweets there whatsoever. I can’t speak for all her followers – but it looks like people are following the BBC’s political correspondent – not some krazy chick called LauraK who tells it like it is.

Regardless of what happens, it a wake-up call that it’s vital to agree with your boss in advance what happens to “your” account when you leave.

@Natasha I agree on the point about personalities making accounts worth following, but it’s worth remembering that the BBC (as per its SM guidelines) had total control over everything that went out on Laura K’s feed…

An interesting piece, spoiled by a bonkers error in the middle.

Tom, what do you mean by “Having tweeted the details of her new ITV account to her then 59,000 followers, only around 1,000 of them started following the new account, which seems to support this assumption.” ??

It’s the same account with a different name, as indeed stated in the article. How could her followers follow her twice?

What did happen is she tweeted details of her BBC successor:
“But follow @BBCNormanS who’s stepping into my shoes in Westminster – but I hope you keep following me here”

@BBCNormanS now has 5,824 followers. So if your 59k figure is accurate, the BBC has lost 54,000 followers.

I followed LauraK because someone retweeted an interesting tweet of hers once, not because she was on a BBC list. And I still follow many other BBC accounts, so even if I hadn’t followed NormanS, I’d still be a ‘BBC follower’.

Follower figures are also flawed because there is likely to be some churn here – Laura could lose 20,000 politics fans and gain 20,000 business fans. Fact is that if @ITVLauraK isn’t interesting I’ll unfollow her. Similarly for @BBCNormanS – so snapshot figures are meaningless.

Part of the point of the BBC’s political correspondents roster is that there are different voices. @BBCPolitics exists as an official account but it’s a bit dry.

The question becomes – are people following BBC Political Correspondent Number 3 or a named individual?

Does the inclusion of Laura’s name in her account name mean it refers to her or the role the person of that name has?

As a hypothetical (and imperfect) example, imagine I followed @ITVEricMorecambe before he and Ernie switched back to the BBC. What should happen?

a) Account becomes @BBCEricMorecambe
b) Account becomes @ITVBobbyBall
c) Account stops. New @BBCEricMorecambe account created.

Option B doesn’t even make sense if that person already has an account, as is often going to be the case.

A more interesting question is: how much does an established Twitter following increase your poachability?

I mention my company name in my twitter account because I believe it’s important to be transparent when I talk about any of our campaigns/products (not that it’s all I talk about)

I think without this level of transparency you could easily accuse people of being a Flogger.

So where can you draw the line? Personally I think if you’re twitter account is a brand and not personalised then yes the company should own it. If people are following a person then no… in this case people are following a person related to a brand and therefore it’s still a person so the person should own it.

@Paul Not sure what you mean by “bonkers error” – perhaps you weren’t aware that she set up a separate account first and appeared to try to divert her followers to a new account. That didn’t happen and only circa 1,000 started following the new account – so circa 59k were following @BBCLauraK whilst circa 1k were following @ITVLauraK, which co-existed for a time. It was only after this that she renamed @BBCLauraK to @ITVLauraK and assigned @BBCLauraK to a new placeholder account with circa 100 followers.

@Tom, I was not aware of that. It appears I started following her after that event.

You should edit your piece to make this fact more clear – not everyone will come to it with that knowledge, so it does appear odd – especially as it appears in your post AFTER the bit about her changing the name of the account. Perhaps change “Having tweeted the details of her new ITV account to her then 59,000 followers” to “When she had earlier tweeted the details of a new separate ITV account to her then 59,000 followers”.

That fact actually makes taking that quantity of followers with her seem deliberate rather than a natural consequence of a logical change.

@Paul Fair point! I’ll ask the editor to amend it if poss…

Here are the BBC social media guidelines.

Will be interesting if they get updated at all but as I read it the BBC would have been in well within it’s rights to take ownership of the account.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/14_07_11_news_social_media_guidance.pdf

@Edward I agree. Editorial control is obviously not the same as ownership, but it seems strange that they didn’t specify who owns each account. The fact that they explicitly state that non-official accounts are “not owned by the BBC” seems to softly imply that official ones are owned by the BBC…

“Tom Callow is an account manager at Automotive PR, maintains the company’s Twitter profile @AutomotivePR and tweets personally @au_tom_otive.”

Given the context, your “personal” twitter account name brings a slight chuckle…

@Kristian indeed – although I think I’m a bit safer on that front…

@Paul change as suggested duly made!

“Many people, myself included, wanted to follow the updates of the BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent (@BBCLauraK)”

But she’s no longer the BBC Political Correspondent. I could understand if her twitter name hadve been “BBCPolicicalCorr” but it wasn’t.

I think the crux is not so much ‘ownership’ but content and individuality. About 1/60th see ‘LauraK’ as a separate brand from her BBC and now ITV identity – as a case study it will be interesting to see what happens to her follower numbers now she is not on her previous beat. Were the followers following her for her BBC Political beat as opposed to ‘her’. Information not personality?

@Iain I suspect they’ll only increase as I’m not aware of any account that’s suffered major losses due to this sort of change.

As for ownership, I still think it’s important. Some accounts are major drivers of traffic to media websites. Ironically, this is far less of an issue for Laura K who rarely if ever linked to the BBC website, whereas it might be a far bigger deal for Robert Peston, who frequently does.

If companies lack the foresight to only allow employees to use accounts provided by the company for corporate stuff, then they have got to live with the naming convention madness they’re going to run into sooner or later. Blame BBC management.

The account was a personal, the “BBC” simply context imho

@Simple have you read the BBC social media guidelines here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/14_07_11_news_social_media_guidance.pdf ?

Interesting that if it was a personal account, why it was entirely controlled/vetted by the BBC and labelled an ‘official’ account…

This needs to be agreed in advance between employee and employer. Also the nature of the account (personal or employer) should be stated on the profile. Including the name of the employer in the account name implies responsibility/ownership lies with employer.

@Adam agreed – ownership wasn’t included in the guidelines/policy, but BBC personnel have since said they made conscious decision to let the account go… My argument is that it could have chosen another – albeit far more controversial and confrontational – path.

Isn’t the reputation and brand of an organisation made up of the reputation and personal brands of the people who work there. An employee’s reputation is theirs to take from employer to employer.

@Simon yes, but I’m not sure you can really equate the tangibility of a Twitter account to the intangibility of reputation can you? Surely the latter is modified by the former?

On that basis does that mean I need to start a new linkedin account every time I move jobs because I have my company name and a link to their website on my profile?

Few points worth reiterating given some comments on here and on Twitter:

- In general, journalist Twitter feeds are a useful tool for media outlets. They can drive traffic to the website or more strategically help build the outlet’s brand and alter its reputation

- The BBC had full editorial control of Laura Kuenssberg’s account

- The BBC heavily promoted the account on its broadcasts and on its website, linking to it as an official broadcast channel

- The account only appeared to be a broadcast channel and never appeared to be being used as a relationship-building device or tool for interacting with other users

- The BBC labelled the account as ‘official’ and explicitly states that it “does not own” unofficial accounts, which suggests that it thinks it might own official ones

- ‘BBC’ was a prominent part of the account name

- When a separate ITV account was initially created and was linked to from the existing BBC account, only circa 1,000 people started following it out of 59,000 following the BBC feed

- The issue, for me at least, isn’t about whether people ‘want’ to follow @ITVLauraK (many of whom won’t even realise that they now are), but whether the BBC should have relinquished such a major – and official – broadcast channel

@Rachel but I doubt your employer’s name is in your LinkedIn profile ‘title’ etc…

Plus on LinkedIn, people are typically making personal connections based on knowing or having come into contact with the person. I’d be surprised if anyone has connected to you on LinkedIn purely or predominantly based on your employer, whereas that is usually, or at least very often, exactly what happens on Twitter.

…I’m talking about Twitter accounts that are used for professional purposes in the last point. e.g. even thought @ruskin147 is Rory Cellan-Jones’s personal account, many people are no doubt following him BECAUSE he works for the BBC…

*make that ‘though’!

Trying to rule on this would be the judgement of Solomon with a bulletproof baby. You can’t split, merge or duplicate a Twitter account, so there’s no right answer.

Clearly, Laura K attracted many of those 60,000 users herself and should be entitled to take them with her, just as she takes more abstract aspects of her public profile (presumably part of what ITV is paying for in poaching her). Equally clearly, the account is specifically identified with her role at the BBC, and the BBC might legitimately want to redirect those users to her successor. Unstoppable force, meet immovable object.

Since they can’t have it both ways, I think it’s correct that the use of someone’s own name ultimately trumps the rights of a corporation. Laura should have her followers, and if the Beeb wants to avoid this in future it should create generic job title accounts – which, of course, won’t attract as many followers.

this is a very interesting piece and raises many issues.. the first i would suggest is that it is impossible to argue issues after things have happened..

I would suggest that the BBC dont have any guidelines or guidance on its empoyees on their use of Twitter, for if they had of done, things would have been simple…

the second is for businesses in general. I hear all to often of mmembers of staff leaving with the Twitter passwords and a sizeable following. This can also lead to many problems.

So, I would encourage all employers to avoid this situation. put in place at the very beginning policies, guidance and guidelines with respect to content, ownership etc… then its black and white.

In Laura’s particular case, the account clearly had @bbclaurak as the username, so it really does imply that it was very much in line with the BBC and in my view should have had a name change to the new owner at the BBC who takes over her role as chief correspondant.

The great thing with Twitter is that people are free to unfollow whenever they like, so many will feel deceived as this is not what they signed up for and will leave the account.. be interesting to see what her numbers are say in a few months..

This is a cautionary tale for all businesses and employees..

Mark Shaw

I note many of the comments are corporate POVs and I wd suggest are mistaken in trying to pin down commercial ownership. It’s odd that many have normalised setting up sometimes compulsory FB fan pages for their staff but are freaked out by twitter. In the words of @greatdismal (William Gibson) himself, Twitter is the Street, Facebook is the mall. My own experience as a reporter/presenter changing employers(starting out as SamiraAhmedC4) a yr ago suggests most media orgs are working it out/making it up/ as they go about ownership. I am freelance, but my employers include national newspapers and the BBC.
I changed my twitter user name long before I left ITN to SamiraAhmedUK specifically to avoid the risk of anyone claiming ownership of my twitterfeed and what is a very personal form of social media interaction. I was still bound as an employee to follow company protocol on social media,(taste, decency,impartiality) and that seems the most reasonable compromise.
Even freelancers are required to comply with different employers’ codes of conduct.
I would advise every journalist not to have a corporate ID in their twitter name, unless they only tweet on it in a very carefully limited official capacity. The beauty of Twitter is that it straddles formal and more personal identity, so it’s proving harder to define the boundaries. Overall I think it wd be a mistake if corporations rush to try to formalise and restrict individual identity on it. A code of conduct is helpful.Like in all journalism, common sense is best of all.

“…unless they only tweet on it in a very  carefully limited official capacity…” – so kind of like the @BBCLauraK account then

Your point is very valid Samira – I’ve outlined in a little chat with @NetMag (http://www.netmagazine.com/news/twitter-account-ownership-questioned), it would be unwise to be too prescriptive on Twitter as it stifles personalities, but it’s useful for an organisation to think about what they own. I’m not just talking commercial assets and brass tax, but digital assets too, which help organisations’ reputations online and contribute to ‘goodwill’ on the balance sheet rather than fixed assets or income to extend the analogy…

V simple for me. If she has the password, she owns the account. And once she took the two Bs and the C off here name, which her ownership of the password enabled her to do, then she was in the clear.

@Charles seriously? So the community or social media manager (whatever their title) at any of the world’s major firms who happens to have the password to their firm’s Twitter account has the right to log in, change the account name and plant their flag in that digital territory?! Surely not…

But the BBC hasn’t lost all those subscribers – I suspect most, if not all, were also subscribed to other accounts which remain BBC-affiliated accounts.

I followed Laura partly because of what she did, and partly because of who she is. But I always thought of her account as being her personal account, albeit one she managed carefully to avoid bringing the BBC into disrepute. So she’s not stolen it from her old work, she’s merely rebadged it to show her new affiliation.

If you left Automotive, Tom, you’d no longer expect to have access to the official accounts – but would you really close down au_tom_otive?

@Tom – but it’s the account with her name on it, not the BBC account – it’s primarily her as an individual not an organisation. We have all got to know what she looks like as a BBC reporter – should she leave her face at the BBC too?

You can’t have it all, can you? If you add your employer’s name to the Twitter “handle”, be prepared to cede or share the employer-loyal followers. At least, promote the handle of your successor or the relevant program.

Sounds like a plan to me dude.

http://www.web-privacy.au.tc

After a quick perusal of the BBC social media guidelines, I think it’s pretty clear that Kuenssberg’s BBC account was property of BBC (and kudos to BBC for allowing her to take it with her). Though considering that those guidelines are dated 12 July 2011, it’s possible that those guidelines might have been very different when she opened the account.

In the absence of such guidelines, I think ownership of joint accounts such as Kuenssberg’s is a very grey area and should really be taken on a case-by-case basis. If the account is created by the company or at the company’s request, is maintained as part of the individual’s duties as an employee of the company, is promoted by the company, and is supervised by the company, it’s clearly the property of the company. If it’s created by the individual, is independent of his employer’s control, is not used to represent the company’s views, and is maintained in large part on the individual’s own time, it’s the property of the individual. Anything in between (which I suspect encompasses the vast majority of such joint accounts) needs to be evaluated individually.

Another way to look at this topic, rather than ownership by company v. ownership by individual, is ownership by company v. ownership by brand. When a brand is uncoupled from a company, most consumers are likely to follow the brand rather than the company. If, for example, the US programme Burn Notice was dropped by USA network and picked up by TNT, most viewers would continue watching Burn Notice on TNT. In that event, one should rightly expect the @BurnNotice_USA Twitter account to be changed to @BurnNotice_TNT or just @BurnNotice. If one considers a TV personality a brand in the same way that a TV programme is a brand, it makes much more sense for an individual such as Kuenssberg to take a joint account with her. Even if the account is an “official” company account, one of the main purposes of a joint account is to exploit the brand of the individual for the company’s benefit.

One last point I’d like to make: while an individual operating a joint account ought to inquire with his boss about the account’s ownership, it is the company’s responsibility to make it known if it intends to claim ownership of employee accounts, either via official company policy such as the BBC’s Social Media Guidelines, or via a direct conversation with any employee operating such an account. Any company that does not do so effectively forfeits their right to claim ownership of such accounts.

Tom Callow’s comments highlight the “everything is ours” mentality of business in the 21st Century.

Companies ceased being loyal to workers about 20 years ago, and workers are finally realizing they must protect themselves accordingly. Kuenssberg did the right thing in claiming what was hers. If the Callow’s of this world had their way, any offspring you conceive while under the employment of a company would belong to them too.

This is such a mixed bag! Some people clearly follow her because it’s her, yet the BBC has an argument to say that they helped create that personal identity by the presupposition of the words “BBC” into her Twitter handle. Therefore I’d say there is fair case for a compromise agreement to be sought, rather than an unanimous decision.

@Simon my personal feed spells out the industry in which I work, not my employer, whose name is entirely coincidental. It’s the equivalent of ‘LauraKNews’ or something…

@Chuck first prize for the over-the-top response to this blog!

If I use your quite ludicrous analogy, the equivalent situation here is if your boss made a baby with you, supported it through childhood and then you tried to claim sole custody. It’s a grey area, so please stop pretending it isn’t…

The question is was Laura able to develop a following of 60,000 as “Laura Kuenssberg” or based on her position as BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent? I would guess as the later. Then my next question, when a very successful sales person move to a competitor do the clients follow them?

Good story. I believe it is more about keeping official and personal profiles separate.

It is a tricky question, and I do not believe it can have only one right answer. The best use is the one mentioned at the end – have both business and personal tweet profile.

Maybe the best decision in Laura’s case would be to tweet links to new accounts – her new business account and also the account of her successor in BBC, so people can choose whom to follow.

You have to define borders BEFORE you start twitting or at least in the moment, you NOTICE the mix between your private and business tweets. Additionally, you are IMHO OBLIGATED to say to your followers, when you dramatically change the profile. a short message: i’m leaving BBC and start ITV would be sufficient for me.

I think what all of these comments lead us to conclude is that when setting up a new Twitter account with your employees, you need to have this discussion.

If you think allowing them to inject some personality into their tweets and obtain a good following for who they are not just where they work or the position they hold then they may have a good argument for including their name in the account.

If you think people will primarily follow due to the organisation they work for the twitter account needs to be named corporately.

If you choose the former, the person should be able to rename the account on leaving that organisation.

If you choose the latter the following and tweets remain with the company.

Just make sure you contact your HR department from the outset!

I think that if I want to follow BBC, I have to follow the official account of BBC. If I choose to follow Laura Kuenssberg, it’s because I like her and her work. So, in this way, her follower belong to her.

Only the impersonal things may belong to the company.

I Assume the previous Business Editor of ITV has, in turn, kept his/her twitter account. Given this, it seems the industry already has a defacto way of dealing with this ‘issue’.

Did Laura Kuenssberg own the twitter account previous to it being called @BBCLauraK? If she did, then it appears to be her account (that she’s augmented considerably by using the reach and notoriety of the BBC – no bad thing in my view). If it was set up during her BBC employment and the account and her tweets had to adhere to all BBC policies/guides etc then it doesn’t seem that personal and the BBC have a case in my view.

@Mike yes, that’s sort of my view too… If she’d wanted to create a personal account for her own views/insights etc. (ones not vetted by the BBC), then my opinion is that she should have done that.

I agree. I think that one can’t compare it to asking for the numbers on her cellphone because she would never have got 60 000 followers if she didn’t work for the BBC.

I think that the BBC is entitled to reclaiming what’s rightfully theirs. The other alternative is that her twitter profile be deleted/purged and created again.

eg. If I worked for the President and I had 120 contacts that were `confidential’ in nature – essentially either those contacts should be removed or it is `property’ of the respective employee.

Interesting post, this shows us that even twitter followers can be lost with some wrong practices. I am looking to increase my followers but finding it really hard, looking for some ways to increase my followers.

Very interesting article. Is this something which should now be clarified in employment contracts? Similar issues to image rights in football for example. What belongs to the club and what belongs to the player?

Perhaps the content nature is key. @BBCLauraK wasn’t really a driver to the BBC site, it was observations by an individual within her sphere of work. As that work sphere has changed, 59000 followers can decide whether to continue following or not.

Thanks for the greatarticle. Online marketing is really atractive.!

As a family dentist in Louisville, KY, this stuff happens all the time with our patients…. If one leaves, they take the free “word of mouth” advertising with them.

It is certainly a problem try to solve current debems before creating or monitoring of accounts. As a company, we formalize the name and management: for a given time and putting disclaimers during this time the community manager.

Without this type of “contract” must evaluate the information, change the name of the account and inform fans of the subject, if they want to stop running!

Courage, our production company in Barcelona will follow!
Oscar

Actually it’s not surprising me at all. It always happen to everyone where they’ve lost followers in social bookmarking site in just no time.

Bryan

I’m glad the BBC saw her move as ‘sensible.’ It shows they understand the importance of the co-branding. The BBC didn’t just lose followers, they lost an amazing journalist. She’s taking her sources and contacts with her – but the headline doesn’t read BBC loses top sources to political coverage. I love that she went a step further in helping the BBC brand by promoting another Twitter account. I see no problems in co-branding. It’s necessary for transparency as well – clearly marks you as a journalist for an organization.