5 Legal Docs Your Website Needs - 004

This is Law and Wit Creative Council for Entrepreneurs. This is episode number 4, The 5 Documents That Your Website Needs. Welcome to Law and Wit Creative Council for Entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Brittany Rettell, mother of 4, entrepreneur, and naptime attorney. Thanks for joining me. I want to apologize, the audio for this podcast episode is not that great. I actually was not recording using my nice, shiny, lovely Yeti microphone that I should be because the USB cord had come disconnected. And so it went to my, just my regular stereo Mac recording, which is not as good. So, and I was just staring at my lovely waves moving up and down. So it was recording, just not recording in what I wanted it to. So sorry about that if it's a little obnoxious, but I'm just gonna roll with it because life's busy and that's what I have time for. And I'd rather get it out there than stress over it. So, but, Lesson learned, and I will try not to make that mistake again. So thanks for your patience. Hello out there and welcome. I'm so glad you're here. Today I wanted to do kind of a new type of episode, and this, in my imagination, in my great scheming creative mind, I want to call a Law and Wit Bit. Because first of all, rhyming, so you pretty much have to. And also because my intention is that it's short and sweet. It's to the point because I don't know about you, but I'm busy, you're busy. I mean, I don't think I've actually ever met a person who didn't claim to be busy. I don't think they exist. They're not out there. I want to cut to the chase. Today I wanted to talk about the 5 different things that you should have on your website. The reason why I wanted to start with this one first of all is because it's pretty much a given that you are going to have a website. No matter what you do. Online, offline, professionally, I imagine you have a website of some sort. And what the 5 things I'm going to talk about today are kind of the legal statements, the kind of legal objects that should be on your website. So I know you guys have probably noticed at a lot of footers of websites you'll see legal or disclaimer or terms and conditions or privacy policy and probably wondered what exactly that is, why do I have to have that, is that for someone else or is that for someone in my type of work? And so we're going to talk about a little bit about that today, about why the answer to probably all those questions is yes, you should have it, and explain a little bit about why and where you can go to find one. And a lot of that depends on what type of business you do, but there's some general guidelines that I'm going to give you. So without further ado, let's, let's jump right in. So the first thing that you need on your website is a privacy policy. I put this at the forefront because it's pretty much a given nowadays in 2017, soon to be 2018, that you are collecting information of some sort when someone visits your website. If you're not, if you don't have some sort of email opt-in box, then you've likely been hiding under a rock and haven't been listening to any email marketing advice given by anyone ever, basically, online. We all know the money's in the list. You got to be collecting email addresses because algorithms change, business models change, social media. You can't control any of that. What you can control are the ways to reach your customers, and that is digitally with an email address. If you collect email addresses, if you have a little opt-in page on your website, whether it's a Mailchimp or ConvertKit or any of the other thousands of email providers, and you collect people's email addresses in the hopes of doing anything with that, even if you don't do anything with it now, even if it's just building up some large database and you don't have a privacy policy. The state of California has regulation that says that everyone who does business with someone who might live in California needs to have it, which basically means everybody because we all know digitally there really aren't any boundaries. It's just good business practice, so please make sure it happens. Now, what needs to go in your privacy policy is basically what you're doing with people's private information. You need to outline what are your intentions. Let's think about if this was a Jane Austen novel. What are your intentions? Honestly with people's email address? Are you going to share it with someone? And a lot of people make really great and noble claims when they have their email opt-in. You know, I see a lot of, "We would never spam you. We would never share your data." And that's really great if you can, if you can actually deliver on those promises. But just be really careful when you're crafting your privacy policy. And this means if you're writing it yourself, if you're working with an attorney to get it done, or if you're just going online to some sort of generator. I know that that's the cheapest option, so I'll, I'll, you know, be honest and that that might be what you plan on doing. Just be really clear that whatever promises you make, you can actually deliver on those. So, and keep in mind that your business may change one day, that someday you may do a joint venture with someone and you'll share email lists. So don't make promises that you won't share people's emails if that's a possibility. What if you have plans on getting purchased or selling to someone else or merging with another company, then you would likely share your list with whoever it is is buying it, because I'm assuming that that's going to be one of your major business assets is your audience, your tribe, whoever you have, and that means that's your list. Just try to be thoughtful and intentional about where your vision is for your growth and make sure your privacy policy doesn't unnecessarily limit and put a governor and hiccup you in your plans someday. 'Cause that's really the only time that I've seen people really get burnt in their privacy policy is when they can't deliver on the promises that they make. And the FTC has actually gone after companies, and that's the Federal Trade Commission, and they're the body that's in charge of protecting consumers, and they really don't like people to not have integrity with their promises that they make to people about what they're gonna do. So make sure you do that. Think about if you're collecting cookies from people, if you have Google Analytics on there, what are you doing with that information? You know, again, cookies, we're not talking about the blue monster here. I'm sure you guys know what a cookie is. If you are storing pixels, if you have affiliate information and codes that's tracking people and you're aggregating that, think about how are you using the information on your website and who you're sharing that with. And if you don't know what happens with that information, then now is a good time to reach out and find out. So hopefully it's being done in a way that is transparent and that you're okay with in terms of information is shared, but it's non-identifying information. And there's two kinds of types of information, ones that are sensitive or personal identifying information. PI sometimes is written for short in privacy policies. And then there's non-personally identifying information or non-PPI. So you'll see that if you start reading privacy policies and doing a little bit of research in terms of what you like and what you don't like, you'll see those terms used. And so think about what you want to do and what your site actually does. So if you need to talk to your web designer your webmaster, your marketing people about what exactly are we collecting to get a handle on that, then go ahead and do that. And just be honest, that's the overarching message here. Be honest about what you can do and just under— it's better to under-promise and over-deliver like with anything else in business. Okay, so that's privacy policy. The next one is the user terms and conditions, and this is a close cousin to the privacy policy. You usually see it right next door. And the, um, what you want to see in the privacy policy basically, um, sorry, in the user terms and conditions, is basically the statement that outlines the policies of your website. Um, and yes, this can be a rather long and boring document, um, but it should also answer some basic questions about how should people be using your website. Can they use the information on your website for their use? Can they take your pictures or your web copy? If it's a type of website where people share their own information, so this is any kind of website that has a forum or has a comment section, what are the guidelines for the information or content that people can submit? Are you going to have limitations on language used or nudity or hate speech? Are you going to have rules about harassment or obscenity or spamming? This is where you would put all of that information. Anything that you want to be able to do on the reactive end in terms of going after someone and saying, hey, this is not acceptable on my site, we don't really want to have this here, it's a lot easier to be able to enforce those rules and take action if you've put people on notice that I've already set out at the onset that these are the rules for my site and this is what is okay and this is what is not okay. If you don't, then it really handcuffs your ability to control trolls and haters and bots, people who might come on and scrape all your content, and anyone else who has access to your site. You want to have really clear expectations for anyone who strolls across your digital real estate, which is what your website really is. Sometimes this is called different things, user terms and conditions or site terms or terms of use. They're all used interchangeably. It's all— we're all talking about the same enchilada here. So it's the same document that you'll see online. Again, it's usually at the footer under legal sometimes, but I would actually suggest that you don't have it buried under another link. The easier it is for your audience to find it and for you to point people to that and say, look, I made it really clear, it's down here, then the easier it is for you to enforce it and say that there was a reasonable expectation that someone actually read it and could comply with it. The more that it's buried and hidden under layers and layers in your site navigation, then the less likely that anyone's looking at it. I mean, let's be honest, we know that this is not scintillating reading, okay? This is not J.K. Rowling. So we want to make it easy for people to find this stuff. So don't bury it. I know it's not the most attractive thing, but you just gotta put your foot down with your web designer here. So don't make it difficult or hard for someone to read or access it. Again, with both of these, you will find online if you start to read and actually notice a whole spectrum in terms of how people write these. There are some that are actually really clear and non-legalese and written in language that probably anyone would understand, and there are some that are super dense and long and read just like the click box that you sign when you get an Apple update that I know full well that you don't actually read.. So there's some discourse among people who write these on the internet that they should be easier to read because then people actually have a chance of complying with them because they're not bogged down in legalese. So think about what fits with your brand and the way that you do business and who your audience is that you're talking to. Is it someone who's going to understand a lot of this vocabulary or not? Then you may want to think about how you want to explain it so that people are on the same page because that really gives you the best chance of protection. And managing expectations is when people know what you're talking about. That you guys are— if you can't understand it, then it's likely someone else doesn't either. Okay, number 3 is copyright notice. And this is a really simple one. So that's going to be the C with a circle. You know, you can find it in your symbol browser. If you have a hard time, actually, if you can't find it, you know, when you're creating content online, open up a Word document, type it in there, and then copy and paste. There's a little trick if you need to insert it somewhere and don't have— the symbol browser is not part of what whatever keyboard that you have. And this just gives notice to people that you are formally claiming the copyright and all rights reserved on your stuff. So, and what you wanna say here is you wanna have the little C with the circle and all rights reserved with the year. So, or the year, all rights reserved. You see it both ways. And then if you have some sort of business entity that runs this material, if you have an LLC or a corporation, or it's just under your name, hopefully it's one of the former, not the latter, then you want to put that as well. And if you have done a significant update to content, then you can change the year from that. Sometimes people you'll see will do a dash because they're copyright for this period. Sometimes people will do, you know, 2014, 2016, 2017, meaning, okay, they kind of did a significant update in those years. But you can put this on even if you haven't formally registered copyright. This little C is open to anybody, so go ahead and claim it, you know. I declare bankruptcy! Like Michael Scott, except it's copyright. You're declaring it right there. You're just making it happen. You are manifesting it. And then it's— someone cannot claim that they didn't know that you had copyrighted your stuff. That they were like, oh, I thought sharing is caring. I thought I could just take your stuff. I thought that's why you put it on the internet is because it was, you know, the Google machine found it, so therefore I can use it too. Someone can't say that when you've put your— I mean, they can't see it anyway even if you don't put this on, but it's another step. Again, it's another tool in your toolbox to say, point right there and say, look, made it very clear that this is copyright information, all rights reserved, okay? You know, or for personal use only, or for non-commercial use, or no derivative works. And you can go down the gamut, but you put all rights reserved, it says I am reserving all of the rights that I might have in the bundle of rights. And we'll talk about that more when I dive into copyright in a later episode. But, um, What you wanted to say is go with the default until you've decided not to, and all rights reserved. You're reserving all rights until you've made a decision not to. So that's that. Um, the next thing that you want to think about is having, um, a disclaimer, number 4. And I know this one doesn't apply to everyone, so I'll put a disclaimer slash FTC compliance because these kind of go hand in hand. So a disclaimer would fit if you are in a licensed field or a health and wellness field, which, yeah, again, is a type of a subset of a licensed field. So if you are in something like finance, accounting, medicine, mental health, personal training, even life coaching, I would add any kind of coaching that ventures or kind of rubs up against or uses some of the same language or techniques as mental health. I, if it were me, I would be putting a disclaimer like this. So again, this is probably the best the best real estate position is in the footer of your website, and you're going to want to say something that clarifies what your role is and how are you offering this information. So, um, and the text that you're looking for here is that these services are for educational purposes only and are not intended to diagnose or treat any physical or mental illness or to be construed as legal, financial, or medical advice. So, you know, if you go to WebMD We all know how we can all go down the WebMD hole. We have a cold and now it looks like apparently that we have stage 4 cancer, we're going to die imminently. If you look at the bottom, WebMD covers, they CYA on this, okay, because they know that people go crazy. At the bottom, they'll say, "Look, we are not physicians and not intended to diagnose or treat any illness. That's not on us, people. We're just throwing this out there. You use this information how you want." That's what you want to be too. You hope that people— that you are making it clear that if you do have any licensing in this, that you're making it very clear when you are acting in a licensed capacity. And it's probably more on a one-on-one basis, you know, with an individual client, and you've hopefully signed some sort of client service arrangement or agreement with someone so that's very clear, and you're protecting yourself in terms of your professional credentials. But if people just stumble across your site and start to read your things— and I see this happening a lot, especially when people are in kind of the quasi, they're in the fitness content creation blogger influencer realm and they're hawking supplements and they show or showing workouts of the day and a lot of that stuff. If you are doing anything in that sphere, please, please put a disclaimer on your site wherever people are consuming your content. It makes it very clear that you are not acting in a professional capacity and if people get hurt, that's on them. You're just out there Sharing information and people should consult a physician before starting any workout program. You guys have all seen the disclaimers and the warnings. There's not any magic words, even the ones that I told you, that will ward off all claims, but they give you your best shot in terms of if someone did actually have an injury and wanted to come after you and thought that you were the one who sent them down that course, that path, that you could protect yourself. If you have any questions about this, you can also contact your— whatever your licensing agency is in your state will usually have some information. If you consult the statute that has— happens to rule and govern how licensing works, it'll give information about this is in the scope of practice and this is not. If you read about, okay, what does it mean to actually practice be within the scope, you want to make sure that you're making clear you're not doing that if you don't want to hold yourself up to that liability as a professional or a licensed service provider. The next part is the FTC compliance. This has risen in prominence after a lot of about 90+ bloggers got letters, kind of scary letters from the FTC earlier this year in 2017 saying, hey, Federal Trade Commission here, knock knock, who's here? Please stop acting like you're just recommending products when we know that you have a commercial relationship. Someone has paid for you to say what you're saying. This is sponsored content, this is advertising. A rose by any other name would still smell sweet. This is advertising, guys. You can call it thanks, collaboration, proud partner, proud, Brand sponsor, enthusiast, whatever, however you want to name it, that's fine. Put it on a t-shirt, but it's advertising, y'all, and that's fine. It should be fine. Own it. Be okay with it. Do whatever mental legwork you need to do on your end to be okay that this is a way that you make money, that you monetize your content creation. You need to make sure if there's any kind of commercial relationship between you and the reason in anything that you are creating content for. And that means that if someone gave you product for free, then if that is affecting the way that you are writing about it because there is some sort of relationship there, meaning that it's a wink wink nod nod, if you say something positive about it that you're going to get more products or you're going to get a free trip or you're going to get a discount code or whatever, you know, that's on the low spectrum in terms of money and benefits changing hand. On the high spectrum, it's okay, someone's giving you $10,000 or $20,000 or whatever to write a blog post or an Instagram or a whole series of campaign or whatever, or a multi-part campaign where you're doing posts or content on something over a long time, over a year-long period. I've seen some contracts. That's kind of on the higher end. You need to disclose that. The industry, what the FTC says is that, again, there's no magic words, but What they have given their blessing to is that ad is short and sweet and to the point. No one is confused by what ad means. Ad means that someone paid for this here and it's part of a commercial relationship. That's clear and concise, and that's what we're looking for is clear and conspicuous, or hashtag ad. But it also should be prominent and the disclosure shouldn't have to be hidden under the fold, so people shouldn't have to click or go on to a different page, meaning If you are writing something like on your blog section and you only get your 3 lines between you have the jump, your disclosure probably needs to come before that just in case no one has seen that. Same thing with Instagram, it should be in the first 3 lines. Don't bury it in a bunch of hashtags, don't try to hide it, don't put it in a sneaky language or a weird font or in a tiny size where no one can read. I mean, don't play these games, guys. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. You don't want to get a scary letter. You don't want to get sought after by the FTC and have, you know, be penalized with hefty fines, which has happened to some companies who have done campaigns with people and not disclosed. There was a whole debacle with Lord Taylor. There was an issue with people, you know, paying gamers to recommend their game, and they didn't disclose it, and they got penalized as well. So it's happened, and it's gonna probably continue to happen that there's more and more pushback and enforcement on this because this is such a rapid new area of influencer marketing, the way people are doing business. I'm going to have another episode where I dive in deep across different platforms because I know that this is an issue that has a lot more nuances and things are changing so quickly and there's a lot of confusion out there. I attended a Twitter chat earlier this year with the FTC and it was amazing how many questions and just fact scenarios that people were trying to— and it was obvious from the questions being submitted and the answers answers that there's still a lot of gray area because this is such a new digital frontier in terms of the way that people are doing content creation, marketing, and digital media. So, okay, but moral of the story is disclose, you know, native advertising, sponsored affiliate relationships, disclose, disclose, disclose. If you have any doubt, disclose that you got these clothes for free. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, and the last thing is ADA compliance, um, number 5. And this one isn't a document per se, but it's the overall feeling of your website, making sure that it conforms to Title III of the ADA, the American Disabilities Act, which says that anything that provides, you know, a place of public accommodation, especially anything that has services or commerce, needs to comply with it, which is likely probably any website. So this means that it might be worth an ask to your designer, your developer, that your site meets the standards found in the WCAG 2.0. Most websites now, especially if it's been updated or built within the last few years, it's more than likely that your elements are going to be okay because we've kind of moved away from the era of Flash designs and things with a lot of elements that didn't have VoiceOver text, that weren't compatible with different user accessibility services that makes it possible for those with disabilities and special needs to be able to access websites and get the information they use to use them. It's likely that your website is probably compliant, but you know, it's worth an email. It's worth a question. If you are in the process of redoing your website, it's definitely worth making sure that whoever is designing it is familiar and at least knows that their designs and what they're planning on doing in their grand scheme is compliant here. Because it's not worth an ADA and Department of Justice penalty, and it's just a poor business practice to leave people out of the market. And again, most of these apply to websites that have a lot of flashing, your blinking design, and websites that are still pretending like it's 2002. I remember when I— this is going to date me a little bit, but I worked for a law firm and did their marketing for a while, and they were redesigning their website, and they were just super gung-ho about the flash, and they wanted a slider and everything to come on smooth, and they just thought it was cool. It was the DeLorean of the websites for the law firm. I remember even then trying to talk people out of it because I'm like, "You know, I think it's going to be slow. It's going to increase load time." Lawyers, I'll tell you what, they're kind of dinosaurs and they're a little stubborn. I know this probably comes as a shocker to many of you who know an attorney, love an attorney, probably against your better judgment. They can be a little stubborn because it's the curse of, "I who know something about this, ergo, must be an expert about everything else." and they've got a little bit of an ego issue, so they want their stuff to look nice. There you go, put that together and you get a perfect storm. All right, so those are the 5 things that I wanted to dive in today, so hopefully that gives you a little flavor flave of the 5. So as a quick review, first is privacy policy, do it. Has nothing to do, it's everything to do with sharing information, which is likely what you are already doing, so make sure that you're in compliance and you know that if you have any third-party things that you're using, you also know what those terms are. You can make the appropriate promises to your audience and whoever's engaging with your information. Second, user terms and conditions. Have them. Use them. Oh, as an aside, if you are an e-commerce site and selling, you know, products, either, you know, physical products or digital products, this is also where you would probably put your return policy and your— if you have specific terms about people using stuff for private use or commercial use or if they can share it or not or anything like that. I know this this gets tricky in those that I've helped with, with digital courses or audio courses or digital goods. I was just helping a client recently who was having a little bit of problems with this, and so we were working through some language that will help them be able to clarify expectations that it's not okay to announce in a Facebook group that you are going to all share in and purchase an audio course and then share it all. But that is actually expressly against the terms and conditions of the course, and that you would be in violation of that. So that's where you'd want to drop drop that knowledge bomb in, is in that section of your website. Number 3 was copyright notice, and 4 was disclaimers and FTC compliance. So all your disclaimers there, and your 5 was your ADA compliance. Okay, so lots of compliance up in here. So exciting. Thanks so much for joining me today, and I want to direct you to a few more resources on the FTC compliance to tide you over until I have an episode on this. If you are interested, if you do any kind of content creation either on the influencer side or if you are working as an intermediary in the affiliate marketing space, if you work for an agency, if you're a social media manager, if you were doing anything in influencer marketing and wading in this stuff, please take a look. I have a free mini course on FTC compliance on my website. So go to brittanyratelle.com, B-R-I-T-T-A-N-Y-R-A-T-E-L-L-E.com, and you'll see right on the front page there, courses, and there's just a mini course It's only an hour long. It's just got easy videos and slideshow to move you through in terms of explaining what FTC compliance means and what the best practices are that have been released from the FTC about how to comply with the various mediums, including the more recent ones of Instagram and Snapchat— Instagram Stories and Snapchat. The other resource I want to direct you to is I have a weekly newsletter that I send out that includes information, little tidbits like this. Along with, uh, I usually review and do a link to my weekly Q&A that I do on Instagram Live. So if you are a small business owner, solopreneur, creative entrepreneur who has a question, um, and would like to jump on with me on Mondays— I try to do it Mondays at 1 PM Mountain Time, so that's noon Pacific— I, I do it on Instagram Live. You can come on. If you want first dibs on question, you can put it on the comments. I usually I put up an Instagram post that morning, but I understand with the algorithm you may not see that. So put it in your calendar just in case, for whatever reason, Instagram thinks that you don't need to see that that day. And don't let them be the nanny of your calendar. Make it a priority if you'd like to jump on and get your question answered. So I usually am on there for about 20 minutes and I'm able to take a few questions and answer them. If you can't make it then, I save it so it's on my stories for the next day and I post them on YouTube. And I link to my newsletter. So that was the point I was getting to that. Sign up for my newsletter, okay? It's funny, it's short and sweet. I make it worth your while. I understand we all have to fight the inbox battles, okay? I am not a noob here. I understand, like, we all have to wage that war. But I'm promising that I am not going to send you any information that's not useful to you. I'm not going to waste your time. If Wednesday comes up and I don't have anything good to say, then I won't send it. Honestly, I won't. I'll just skip it and, you know, bad on me. You can sign up for that at BrittanyRettell.com/, or slashy if you're a Zoolander fan, newsletter. So there you go. Makes it simple and sweet. And you also get a little creative business owner legal cheat sheet, which is a little checklist that kind of goes through some of the major areas that you should be thinking about in setting up and protecting your creative entrepreneurial endeavor. So there's a bonus for you. Okay, I think that's enough because now I'm looking at the clock and this is in fact one of my longer episodes. So much for being short and sweet, but you know, it's all about intentional, right? Intentional living. So thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate it because if you're not here, then I'm just a weird girl talking into a microphone at night while my kids are asleep. So there you go. Thanks so much and hope you have a great day. If you like what you heard, please share with a friend or leave a review in iTunes. That's how I'm able to get my content out to more people. Thank you so, so much. I will be reading some of the reviews in the future, so I really appreciate, um, and your business might get a little shout out. So please go to the icon, um, underneath the episode, the series Lawn Wit, the podcast in iTunes, and you should be able to see under ratings and review, leave your very own. Thank you.