Manage Your Online Reputation. Tony Wilson

      Like many of the most interesting moments in life (literary and otherwise), the opportunity doesn’t so much knock at the door as fall from the sky from nowhere, landing on your plate for you to either take advantage of or not. If you’re really lucky, drinks may be involved.

      I practice franchising, licensing, and intellectual property law in Vancouver, British Columbia. Although the bulk of my practice involves franchised restaurants, hotels, and retail businesses, a fair chunk of my legal practice involves trademarks, copyright, technology licensing, intellectual property, and privacy law, and all of these interesting areas of law involve, to some degree, the use or misuse of the Internet.

      In September of 2009, I met with the managing editor and publicist of Self-Counsel Press at a warm outdoor patio bar (Cactus Club, if you must know), over a couple of bottles of Kim Crawford Pinot Noir to discuss the just-released second edition of Buying a Franchise in Canada. The first edition had sold out and we were about to release the second edition with new updates. It seemed like a good excuse for drinks with the managing editor and publicist!

      I used this moment to pitch another book on franchise law but from a different perspective. Instead, the managing editor, Eileen Velthuis, pitched a book to me, which I can tell you, doesn’t happen that much in the book business.

      “We’d like you to write a book for us about online reputation management,” Velthuis said. “The book would be about how to manage your personal reputation online as well as your company’s brand and reputation over the Internet in this environment of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. There are intellectual property issues, privacy issues, contract issues, and the whole area is very cutting edge. What do you think?”

      I knew my own kids were on Facebook all of the time, but I wasn’t “on it,” and frankly, I didn’t see the need or have the desire to reconnect with people who I could just as easily keep in contact with by emailing, sending a card by regular mail, or simply picking up the telephone and calling them. Or, of course, I could choose to avoid them altogether!

      As for LinkedIn, I was “on it” but wasn’t really using it for anything other than posting my biography and responding to others who wanted to be part of my business network. LinkedIn is a big online place for building up your résumé. If you’re not in the job market, you might not use it as much as people who are (or who expect to be).

      It was an interesting moment to have been pitched a book on something as “cutting edge” as online reputation management. I could have set my mind back to 1978, where, as a summer researcher for the British Columbia Government in Victoria, I was shown a new technological wonder where electronic copies of original documents could be sent from Victoria to Vancouver (or anywhere else in the world for that matter) over telephone lines using a machine about the size of a television set. It was called a Facs machine; facs standing for facsimile (which everyone wrote as “fax”).

      Or, I could have recalled 12 years later, a meeting at one of my old law firms where the partners regaled against this new system called “voice mail.” Messages were not personally left with a receptionist and written on a small piece of paper, but recorded through an automated answering system connected to each lawyer’s phone; the type you might have at home.

      “We should not go in this direction,” said one older lawyer. “It’s totally insensitive, not what lawyers do, and our clients will hate it because there is no personal interaction.” Of course, he didn’t realize that it was the clients who were now using voice mail because they didn’t have to hire receptionists and other staff to simply take messages on little pink slips. Lawyers are often the last people to understand the implications of new technology.

      Or, I could have recalled another meeting at another law firm I was at in the early 1990s where all the lawyers were debating whether to adopt a technology called “electronic mail,” or “email,” where messages were typed into the computer and sent instantly to other parties over this new thing called the “Internet.” Larger documents such as letters or contracts could be “attached” to these emails and when “downloaded,” could be modified within the body of the document itself; something one couldn’t do with a fax. The partners at the firm decided that one computer in the library would suffice for email; otherwise, they would have to pay for computers on all the lawyers’ desks, an Internet connection, and all the security that went along with that. There were flimsy and hollow excuses of why not to use the electronic mail system, and needless to say, that law firm is no longer around.

      I could have thought about my own law firm, where the CEO (at the time) was against allowing LinkedIn to be accessible to lawyers from their office computers.

      For some reason, I didn’t think of these “eureka” or “ah-ha” moments in communications technology, where something new — something we now take for granted today — was introduced to (or withheld from) my coworkers and I.

      Instead, I thought of my mother, Diane Wilson, whose sudden and unexpected death in April 2009 was revealed to me not by a sad telephone call, but on Facebook. Death by Facebook, you might say.

      I had last seen her right after a long lunch with a close friend I don’t see often enough at Pagliacci’s in Victoria. After lunch, on the way to the ferry home to Vancouver, I stopped in to see my mother at her apartment, and fixed something on her computer. I vaguely recall her asking me how she could get on Facebook. At the time, I knew little or nothing about Facebook; how things were about to change, for both of us.

      Three weeks later, I was at a lacrosse game with my son when my daughter phoned me on my cell. She was at home, totally beside herself, and barely able to string a sentence together. “What’s wrong?” I asked. She couldn’t tell me because she was in tears. She said I had to leave the lacrosse game and get home right away. She wouldn’t say why. I left immediately and drove ten miles home wondering whether she’d been in a car accident, or she’d set the house on fire, or she’d thrown a baseball through our brand new flat screen television.

      As soon as I came into the house, she took me by the hand and walked me immediately over to her Facebook page on the iMac, and pointed to the screen. (Remember, I wasn’t on Facebook so I wasn’t really sure what to look at. At the time, I never expected to be on Facebook, but my daughter and my son were on it constantly.)

      My daughter showed me a “status update,” posted perhaps 60 minutes previously by my niece in Calgary, which said something like this: “Grandma, we love you, RIP. You’re in a better place now.”

      “What?” I asked myself.

      My mom died in her apartment, in her sleep. My brother and my other niece couldn’t reach her on the phone for a couple of days. They thought that maybe she was out for a walk, or napping, or out with a friend. My brother and his other daughter drove to my Mom’s building in suburban Sidney to check on her. They found she had passed away, and my youngest niece, who lived in Victoria, immediately phoned her sister in Calgary to tell her. My niece in Calgary immediately posted the RIP in her status update on Facebook for the world to see.

      When my brother phoned me a few minutes