Did you hear? There’s a social media revolution! The new way to market your business is through online sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and a dozen more. You can “friend” people, set up fan pages and groups for your business. You can twitter and tweet. You can set up a blog and give the world weekly, daily or even hourly updates about your business, your product, your services. Even your employees are getting into the act, posting to your blog, setting up their own blog, tweeting about the latest event at work and connecting with co-workers and friends on Facebook.

Think about it . . . all you need to do is type your message and hit “post” and, lo and behold, your message has been distributed to hundreds, thousands . . . maybe millions of people around the world. And it doesn’t cost anything . . . or does it?

What if you say the wrong thing? What if you put the wrong information out to millions of people? What if you “post” and then realize you made a mistake?

What happens in Vegas, stays on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, YouTube and Twitter forever. Setting some legal guidelines for social media can save a lot of time, headaches
and money.

Establish an image for your company and make sure that anyone participating in social media sites related to your business maintains that image — if in doubt, they should ask before posting. While it can be very funny for someone to take a picture of their drunk buddy, it’s not so funny if that picture ends up on your blog or fan page. Assume your customers will look at your social media sites before and during their project.