Enterprise Features

4 Business IT Risks Of Social Media Sites Like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others

by admin

Disclosure and Retention Compliance Violations

Much like emails, memos or contracts, all of the social media activity produced by your company and its employees can be considered to be business communications documents. This means that you might be required to disclose them later on in court.

Current trends show that this will only grow in importance, given the increasing pressure from new electronic discovery legislations. Even if a message is published and later deleted, you still need to maintain a copy in your records.

This is especially true of highly-regulated industries such as healthcare, government and insurance.
Slander, Rumours and Inappropriate Comments

Increasingly, the courts are finding that companies can be held responsible for the online activities of their employees. This even applies to personal profiles and social networking profiles.

• A false statement from one of your employee can get your company sued
• An embarrassing or illegal statement by one of your employees could destroy client relationships and brand reputation
• A false rumour, started by a competitor, could spread rapidly, requiring legal action on your part

Leaking Of Sensitive Internal Information

Companies have lots of sensitive information that needs to be protected at all costs.

• Leaking a client list to competitors can destroy a company’s competitive advantage
• Leaking PR details can lead to expensive privacy lawsuits from employees
• Leaking financial data can harm investors, suppliers and other stakeholders

Your organization needs to set very specific rules about what sort of information can or can’t be discussed on social networks, and these polices must be strictly and harshly enforced. One slip-up is all it can take to destroy a company overnight.

Social Networks as a Potential Entry Point For Hackers and Identity Thieves

Unfortunately, many social network providers think very little of their users’ privacy and security. In fact, many social networking sites have been known to store personally identifiable information and account passwords in unencrypted format within their databases.

According to a recent article from the Business Insider, Facebook has allegedly used login/password data collected from the site to hack into the private email accounts of their users.

This allegation is fairly reasonable when you consider that Mark Zuckerberg himself is famous for having made many public statements suggesting that he doesn’t feel his users are entitled to privacy.

And now that Web 2.0 allows web sites to combine functionality though APIs, a single weak link in the chain could carry very serious consequences.

For example, many web sites now let you log in using your Facebook account.

This is made worse by the fact that your employees’ social media accounts also contain large amounts of personally identifiable information that could be used by identity thieves to commit fraud against your company, or against others using the identity of an employee form your organization.

And finally, let’s not forget that Social Media is one of the fastest growing sources for new virus attacks, phishing and malware.

Branding, Image and Reputation

Having a strong, unified, cohesive brand message is a pillar of good marketing.
In order for your brand to be effective, every piece of marketing collateral or messaging that your release must convey the same brand experience. (Benefits, colours, lifestyle experience, slogans, media sound bites, etc…)

If your employees publish statements about your product that conflict with your primary marketing message, this can cause confusion and loss of trust in the eyes of your customers. For the same reason, it’s important that your employees keep a good public image in any area that can be linked to your company.

A great example of this could be seen with the recent Michael Phelps scandal, where the press obtained photos of him allegedly smoking marijuana. A number of brands had to cancel their endorsement contracts because they could not afford to have their brand associated with his lifestyle.

But that’s an extreme example. There are other ways that the behaviour of your employees could cause problems for your brand.

• If an employee lists themselves as employed by your company in their social media profile, while making racist remarks on the Internet
• If an employee publicly espouses negative or embarrassing opinions about your company or its customers
• If an employee uses social networking to publish embarrassing or offensive photos of themselves or unprofessional activities in the workplace
• If one of your employees picks a fight with a critic on behalf of your company, and uses unapproved or offensive messaging to do so
• Someone on the internet might pretend to be your company, and say things that create a bad reputation for your organization