Social media & the law, with Steve Kuncewicz

As our fourth session at The Juice Academy approached, we were told we would be joined by social media lawyer, Steve Kuncewicz. Steve has won numerous awards within his sector and has the biggest Twitter following of any lawyer in Manchester! So as you can tell, we were very excited to hear from him, and for him to pass just a fraction of his expertise down to us.

We started the session off with a big task. In groups of two and three, we were tasked with creating our own independent PR agency, complete with values and goals. We were then given the task of managing five different scenarios and were asked to show how we would deal with them in the most effective way possible. The overall aim was to create a ten minute PowerPoint presentation including all the scenarios, with an in-depth analysis of how we would deal with those scenarios.

As a pair, Nathan and I decided to go down the sophisticated route and for every scenario that didn’t work we looked for an alternative that would. A good example of this is the slide we did on crowd sourced images: a fictional company came to us asking whether they could use images which looked crowd sourced. Instead of giving them a straight “No”, we gave them an alternative.

After our presentation, Steve talked us through why this would be an essential part of being a PR company and the consequences that might occur if the proposed images were actually sent out. This gave us a greater understanding of how you can’t really get away with anything in public relations because there will always be people checking up on it. Steve then gave us some examples of celebrity cases he has dealt with. I found this especially interesting as it gives you an insight into what really goes on.

Then it was Steve’s turn to present to us. He talked through all the logistics of social media law which enhanced everyone’s knowledge of what we can and can’t do. I personally learnt just how brutal the copyright laws can be and how important it is to stick to the required guidelines.

Overall, it was a really enjoyable few hours with Steve and I for one will certainly take a lot of knowledge from this session.