Are your bank or credit union employees leaving positive online reviews? Awesome. That’s a wonderful thing to let people know how much they love the bank. But are they violating influencer aws by doing so? Oh my goodness, that could be terrible for social media compliance for credit unions or social media compliance for banks.
As a social media law firm, we’re here to teach you how your bank or credit union can comply with influencer laws and FFIEC Social Media Guidance when your employees are leaving online reviews or endorsements. Now, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Before we get started, you’re thinking, “My employees who leave online reviews on Google and Facebook could be putting us at risk?” The answer is yes. You see, influencer laws are governed by the Federal Trade Commission or the FTC. They have a law that’s called Truth In Advertising and they want to make sure that anyone who’s promoting products or services or a business does so truthfully, and these laws extend to online reviews or endorsements.
So typically, when we think of influencer laws, we think of a company hiring, I don’t know, Justin Bieber and “Biebs” would make an Instagram post or a tweet about how much he likes a particular products and service. It gets a billion likes and a whole bunch of sales and then everyone wins. Biebs gets paid, your company that hires this influencer gets all this wonderful engagement and new sales, and it’s a match made in heaven. Unless the influencer or the company that hires them doesn’t follow the law by requiring the influencer to use clear and conspicuous disclosures that this is a sponsored post or that there’s some sort of material connection between the influencer and the brand that hires them. So, you’re like, “Okay, this makes sense, but we’re not hiring Justin Bieber to promote our financial institution.” I don’t know why you wouldn’t, the guy’s awesome. But here’s the thing:
Under the law, your employees are influencers. I’m going to say that again for those people in the back, your employees are considered influencers under the law. Why? Because there is a material connection between the employee and your company that the public might not know when they see their online review. Okay. What do we mean by that? Let’s say that I’m thinking about whether I want to hire or sign up with a particular bank or credit union and I search online and I see that Bank A has 75 five star reviews and Bank B only has 30. Based on those reviews alone, which bank might I want to do business with? Of course, the one with more positive reviews. But what if I didn’t know that 10, 20, 30, 50 of those reviews came from your employees? Wouldn’t I want to know that the review came from someone that had a connection with the company? Of course, you would, and in fact you are required to do so under the law.
An employee must say in a clear and conspicuous way, “I work for Bank A and they’re the best bank ever. They’ve got awesome rates and they treat the community wonderfully.” You can still leave reviews in a way that complies with the law, but if you don’t clearly and conspicuously disclose the relationship between the employee and the company when they have the review, you can be fined up to $16,000 by the FTC. $16,000 for every single review. Multiply that by 10 reviews and that’s more money than our law firm makes it a year. Maybe something like that, hopefully we make more than that. But the bottom line is your employees can get you in trouble.
So how you have online positive reviews and make your employees advocates for your bank or credit union, but also comply with FTC laws on the other hand? And the answer is to have Employee Advocacy Guidelines, meaning you have to tell your employees what they should or should not do if they’re going to leave an online review. These guidelines should be included in, or in addition to, your Employee Social Media Use Policy. The guidelines should explain what employee must, and must not do, to comply with influencer laws when leaving online reviews.
You also have to provide training to your employees as part of their Employee Social Media Use Training because, look, your employees don’t want to get you in trouble, they want to just leave you good reviews because they like you. But if you don’t tell them the proper way to leave the reviews, then your bank or credit union can be held responsible as well for all those really expensive fines because let’s face it, the FTC is not going to go after the employee, they’re going to go after you and no one wants that. The FTC wants people to leave wonderful, genuine online reviews that complies with Truth In Advertising laws. So you have to make sure that your bank or credit union has the right types of policies, procedures, and training to empower your employees to leave reviews so that you can maintain social media compliance for credit unions or social media compliance for banks.
That is what we call social media risk management and it should be a part of your bank or credit union’s social media risk management program. Now, you’re or thinking to yourself, “What do you mean? I have to have a program?” And the answer is hell yeah. The Federal Financial Institution Examination Council recently released social media guidance that says, in a nutshell, “Every bank or credit union that uses social media must have a risk management program to help manage those specific risks.” And one of those risks are going to be influencer laws by complying with the FTC’s Truth In Advertising guidelines when leaving online reviews. So you might be thinking to yourself, “I need to know (a) what the laws that apply to my financial institution’s social media use, and (b) how do I manage those risks? Well, never fear The Social Media Law Firm is here.
We have prepared a free guide on how banks and credit unions can manage social media legal risk. And you can download that guide today for free by visiting financialfridays.co, that’s financialfridays.co not .com, because they couldn’t afford the domain name, it was like $2,000. So you’ve got to visit financialfridays.co and you can download our free guide today on how your bank or credit union can manage social media legal risks. And if your financial institution needs help with setting up your social media risk management program, just reach out to us below!
