With the increasing amount of lawsuits between companies and former employees popping up about possession of social properties, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to put safeguards in place around their social accounts.

Last year Noah Kravitz had helped his PhoneDog Twitter account amass over 17,000 followers – and while it originally under the name @Phonedog_Noah, the company allowed him to change the name under the condition he occasionally tweet about PhoneDog. So when he left the company, he took his account access with him, much to the chagrin of PhoneDog, who took Kravitz to court over the possession of the account.

A similar case also has arisen with a LinkedIn account that the employer took over from Linda Eagle after she left, rendering her unable to access contacts she created while at the company.  A federal judge dismissed most of the claims in her lawsuit, giving ownership of the contacts to the company because she had developed them while with it.

The last thing you want your company to get involved with is a high profile lawsuit with a former employee over a social media account, which is why I will lay out 5 ways to help prevent this situation from arising in the future.

1)      Own all of your accounts.
When creating your companies social media accounts, make sure they are established under a corporate email account (i.e. socialmedia@mycompany.com). This prevents the employee setting it up to use their email account, giving them a stronger case for possession in the future. In the case of networks like Facebook and Google+, where users can be made administrators, do that instead of giving over the actual login, which would give them the ability to change the password.

2)      Create a social media policy for all employees.
This will let you set boundaries and expectations for whoever is running social media for your company, as well as the rest of employees. Put a clear section explaining that all social media activities done on behalf of the company are the sole possession of the company. This policy should also spell out how employees should create their accounts if they want to leverage the company name (i.e. use @Jack_CompanyX on Twitter), and how they should act if they choose to directly represent the company in that way. Policy examples: http://socialmediagovernance.com/policies.php

3)      Create a protocol & brand guidelines for each social media account.
Before allowing an employee to create content on your company’s behalf, create brand guidelines for each account. This would include how to respond to customer service issues, key words and phrases to use and not to use, and other caveats that are important the brand.

4)      Distribute social media accountability.
This is something that should be done no matter what, because while it seems convenient to have one person run everything, it doesn’t give a full perspective of the culture of your company. And, by having a people from different departments sharing responsibility for some of the content creation, it will give the account more of an overall brand feel instead of that of just that of the community manager.

5)      Monitor content and performance on a regular basis.
Once you start to trust those who are creating content for your brand, it is easy to stop checking on what they post every day, but you certainly should be. There are more than a few horror stories of community managers accidentally posting to the company page from personal accounts, or posting other inappropriate things (intentionally or not) that can be damaging to the company. Make it a point to read over content almost every day, and set alerts to gather recaps of weekly content to help make sure you don’t miss something that goes up and could be damaging to your brand.

With court’s ruling both for and against companies in situations with employees claiming accounts are actually theirs, it is incredibly important for your brand to make sure you have full possession of all properties.