The perils of blogging and libel laws

Sir Martin Sorrell, founder of marketing services giant WPP, was in the London's High Court yesterday suing two former associates over a "bitterly hostile" campaign against him and his Italian chief operating officer, Daniela Weber via blog posts and e-mail.

It is alleged that Sorrell and Ms Weber were described as:

"the mad dwarf and the nympho schizo"

This is the first high-profile libel case in the UK to focus on comments made on a blog and the full report of the case can be found in today's Financial Times

According to the article, it follows a bitter press campaign against WPP by employees of FullSix. A lawyer acting for FullSix's Mr Benatti told a counterpart at WPP that the executive 'would be devoting the next few years to destroying Sir Martin and WPP.'

It again goes to show the importance of blogging guidelines for all staff, as reported in this week's issue of Melcrum's Social Media Newsletter. With examples given from IBM and Sun Microsystems.

As IBM rightly say: Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time.

Robin Crumby

Comments

[Matt O'Neill]

that's a good subject to be looking at, robin.

i did a couple of posts last year, where I interviewed the General Counsel of Sun Microsystems and a UK based solicitor on the subject.

if interested:

http://activate.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/09/external_facing.html (Sun)

http://activate.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/09/corporate_blogg.html (UK solicitor)

cheers,

m

[Jonathan Sheppard]

Political blogging and indeed podcasting is also an interesting area. There are a few sites around where rumours are abound, yet the libel laws don't seem to have been used as it would effectively make more of a story than the original rumour in the first place.

[Robin Crumby]

Matt - thanks for sharing the links to the Q&A extras. I'm sure the WPP case is unfortunately only the first of many, until corporates get some robust guidelines in place. The Melcrum social media survey showed that only 30% of respondents have blogging guidelines in place. But the trick is to avoid over-regulation and killing all enthusiasm stone dead. So guidelines are best written by anyone but lawyers!