Ownership of joint Twitter accounts: where does the boundary lie?

As joint Twitter accounts are becoming more and more common in many professions, time should be spent in considering the mutual advantages and disadvantages before the employer decides where to draw the line. In the case of Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC Twitter account that boasted over 60,000 followers, one should consider that most of the followers were due to her link to the BBC brand. This is proved by the fact that only 1,000 of her followers migrated to her new ITV account. I believe that it is difficult to ascertain which portion of these followers can be attributed directly to Laura rather than solely to the BBC brand. As is often the case with intangible brand attributes, value is created through the synergy of the two parties.

However, one might argue that Laura worked really hard to create and manage that community. Even if the topics of the tweets were obviously related to the information she got from the BBC, she added value to it with her professional skills. Of course, if the tweets were of a personal nature and she dealt with them in her free time, the issue of ownership would not apply. If, on the contrary, they were entirely requested and supervised by the BBC then they would be property of the BBC. The problem is that most of her tweets must have fallen somewhere in between and it is this grey area that creates confusion on where to draw the line.

The next question is: would the BBC benefit more by having generic Twitter accounts without the name of the correspondent? This would obviously make it easier for them to transfer Twitter accounts to new employees without resorting to changing the name of the account every time. This would also simplify the issue for the followers who would not have to look for a specific new name. On the other hand, would the followers on Twitter be sensitive to this? One might argue that the nature of Twitter is that it provides a personal link to a specific person and people want to communicate in an informal way to opinion leaders and not just to a virtual indefinite entity.

An obvious solution would be to introduce formal social media guidelines for the resolution of these issues. The ‘problem’ is that the BBC only introduced these on 12 July 2011. What happens with the accounts, the vast majority, which were activated well before this date? I think these should be renegotiated on a one-to-one basis with individual employees based on the actual content of the account in question. There was obviously an oversight on the part of the BBC which provided her account in their official list without having previously discussed this ownership issue with Laura. My suggestion would be to split professional and personal accounts to avoid any future misunderstandings. If in your personal account you wish to capitalize on your professional background and position, you can still do so by mentioning this in your bio.

On a final note, I would recommend that all employees clarify all these issues with their employer prior to opening their account. It is also the responsibility of companies to have explicit policies in this field and indeed hold direct conversations with their employees to set mutually agreed boundaries. In absence of this, as in the case of the BBC, the company forfeits ownership of the account. The virtual dimension of this type of communication certainly adds to the complexity of this problem which cannot, however, be ignored.