A simple description of Facebook, Twitter, My Space, LinkedIn or Flickr collectively, can be refered to internet and mobile based publishing technologies that allow individuals to share information in various forms with each other and the general public.
Soon enough as social media keeps dominating business communication; it is growing and follows the e-commerce evolution. Despite this new age of conversing, social media is not a piece of cake, there are many risks that prevail an organization as employees engage in using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn among other social interractive online forums.
Problem at hand, Is your brand at risk
The ever increasing adoption of social media by business also begs the question: What if any legal risks are attached to social media adoption by an enterprise.
In as much as a good percentage of individuals perceive business outreach via social media networks boosts devotion and improves customers’ loyalty to a company. Though, lack of formal guidelines on the way employees interact with the social media may have serious repucursions.
On an international view, social media presents two general threats to enterprises -- phishing attacks and disclosure of intellectual property, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at San Francisco-based nCircle Inc.
As pressure builds from multiple fronts. Sales and marketing teams want to engage and sell to customers through social computing. Users want more freedom to access personal accounts from the workplace. HR teams want to be able to recruit, hire and retain social media-savvy employees, yet they might not be aware of the risks involved in engaging with these forums.
Some of the risks involved include loss of reputation and possible liable suits when employees blab or posts photos and videos about what they shouldn't. There are also risks of malware attacks, identity theft, phishing and privacy breach of sensitive data.
A practical example of Telcom limited in South Africa, suffered the rath of customers hate site actions. Due to monopolizing the telecommunication industry, the company handled its customers in a bad way. They responded by creating a page “Telkom hellcom” that ruined the company’s reputation.
Individuals can also masquerade as companies or people on social media sites and put out false messaging that is interpreted by the public as being real. This can affect stock prices and it can impact what shareholders think of a company thus impacting investment and the bottom line.
Lots of inappropriate information is passed in these environments that might cost organization image. According to Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in 2010, business managers should be held responsible for security in social media forums and not the IT department.
Governing social media, get involved, share and apologize
In East Africa, Millward Brown, a global research company carried a research on 25 coporate companies on what policy measures they have taken when interacting in the social forums. None of them have written policies in place to govern the use of social media.
Organizations should make sure that the corporate communication policy not only covers the media and press, but also social networking. Though, many East African companies have tried wholesale blocking of these sites.
By doing this on corporate PCs obviously doesn't prevent anyone from using alterative means, to go out and make the same outrageous mistakes that could harm the company.
This however is a temporary solution because according to Millward Brown research statistics, the social way of sharing information is growing at an alarming rate.
Social media is rewriting the rules of IT security and changing the security perspective of enterprises. The way these communication forums are packaged, it is very hard to control data breeches like in case of emails. Enterprises can only counter this by responding positively to what customers say about them.
Due to the sophisticated techniques of securing social media content that arent fully effective, employees must understand what confidential data is. So when they are on these sites, they understand the ramifications of what they are doing.
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