According to a client’s legal team, it is.

We’re handling the social media marketing for a fairly large event for 14-17 year olds. We’d planned on using our monitoring tools to find people who mentioned the client’s brand and the bands playing at the event and then adding them as friends on MySpace and Facebook and following them on Twitter. It’s what lots of people do, it’s what brands have done to me. But, according to the legal team, that counted as spam.

In fact, the exact words from the client were:

“The lawyer and I were of the opinion that all these suggestions are in contravention of the Spam and Privacy Acts, but she (the lawyer) checked with a contact who is a specialist in the Spam Act to see if there are any loop holes.  There aren’t.”

Have you ever been be-friended by a company that was reasonably relevant to you? How did you feel about it? Has anyone checked their inbox lately and seen that a large corporation has added them? I’m keen to know so I can build a case study for my client. I’m of the opinion that if you’re adding people who have mentioned your brand, or are clearly talking about directly related topics than it’s fine - they can always just say no. What do you think?

This question came up with a client this morning. The short answer is that you own them and by uploading them you just give them permission to display them according to the terms you specify in your privacy settings. The Consumerist ran a story a little while ago titled “Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”“, which caused a bit of furore (read about it in a state of the social mediasphere I wrote in March). But in reality, it was a storm in a teacup.

Facebook’s terms of service actually state that “You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how we share your content through your privacy and application settings.” user content and applications are exempt from its claims on content ownership and Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt is on the record as saying:

“We are not claiming and have never claimed ownership of material that users upload. The new Terms were clarified to be more consistent with the behavior of the site. That is, if you send a message to another user (or post to their wall, etc…), that content might not be removed by Facebook if you delete your account (but can be deleted by your friend).

Facebook’s license only permits it to use user content “in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.” And second, if that Facebook content was not public, the site will respect the member’s chosen privacy settings. In other words, if the photos you have uploaded to it are only accessible to people on your friends list, Facebook says it does not have the right to show those photos to anyone outside your friends list.

MySpace has quite a clear policy too. Their terms are at http://www1.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.terms.

The part that deals with photos says: “MySpace.com does not claim any ownership rights in the text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, musical works, works of authorship, or any other materials (collectively, “Content”) that you post to the MySpace Services. After posting your Content to the MySpace Services, you continue to retain all ownership rights in such Content, and you continue to have the right to use your Content in any way you choose. By displaying or publishing (”posting”) any Content on or through the MySpace Services, you hereby grant to MySpace.com a limited license to use, modify, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce, and distribute such Content solely on and through the MySpace Services.”