A universe of applications, many hidden from view, are connected to your corporate social media properties.Uncounted, unmonitored, and ungoverned, each is a potential social media security risk, as well as a real security risk to your enterprise.

Think about the many social media properties, which represent your enterprise, and ask yourself:

• Over time, how many people have had the ability to connect applications?
• How many people still have the credentials or permission to connect applications?
• How many applications now have access to these properties?
• Have any of those applications been compromised?
• Have any of the credentials used to log into those third-party applications been compromised?

These are the questions that every corporate Security and Social Media Governance professional should be asking. Because there is a prevalence of hidden security risks from the corporate social media footprint.

At Brandle, we're all about helping customers govern their corporate digital footprint and mitigate social media security risks. Monitoring compliance in social media profiles has been at the forefront of the Brandle Presence Manager, and now, Brandle is pleased to announce POP Post Governance to help govern social media compliance for posts.  

Why did Brandle venture into social media posts when there are so many other tools that publish and monitor post content? Because the governance and risk perspective is different than the marketing perspective of social media. 

Let's look at POP Post Governance and how it can mitigate compliance and security risks that arise from a corporate social media footprint.

There is nothing like a social network hack to remind us all that the social media security concerns touted by IT and Risk departments are not only valid but critical. While this recent Twitter hack attacked mainly high-profile verified personal accounts, it is certainly a reminder that security threats exist for corporations. In fact, the larger the digital footprint is for a company, the greater the social media security concern. For marketers and digital governance professionals, these risks are known and we do our best to manage them. Managing governance for a large digital footprint has always had its challenges; and managing social media governance from home adds even more security risks!

Brandle is excited to announce POP POSTS, our new content monitoring feature of the Brandle Presence Manager GRC Module. Since our launch in 2011, we have always monitored the profile content on the social media properties. Our focus was to discover and monitor the representation of the social property to catch bad actors creating counterfeit sites and to discover stale POPs (points-of-presence) that our customers needed to remove from their digital footprint. We left the content stream to publishing and listening platforms. But as social media governance and compliance needs have grown, our customers have requested that we expand our compliance features to the content stream (also called "post" area) of social media. Now, Brandle proudly boasts that POP Posts for the Brandle Presence Manager delivers comprehensive social media monitoring and compliance for all content in social media!

During this challenging time of working-from-home, we are all trying to stay motivated and focused to produce the work that can make a difference in the world. Eventually, we and our co-workers will return to the office and the work we do now will help us transition into the business that will be required of us later. At this time, the visibility of what may be "required" is foggy at best, but for those of us in the social media governance space, we do know that the digital world is not slowing down. In fact, social media security is more critical than ever with bad actors taking advantage of consumer fears and political campaigns lying in wait.

We are fortunate that much of the Tech industry is able to work from home during our current Covid-19 pandemic. Brandle fully supports our employees to be remote workers during this time, and we are ready to help our customers in anyway we can. This is why we turned our attention to release a new feature set called Tasks. 

We know that teams get into their own work rhythm inside a company. Managing team duties and tasks around social media and digital governance can be more complicated when everyone is working from home. So we decided to create some features to make it easier for remote workers. Brandle Tasks has been on the development roadmap, but we expedited the code and testing this past week to help our customers who are newly working from home. This feature is offered to all of our customers at no additional fee.

Brandle Tasks can now help you manage team responsibilities, track specific tasks, and mark them as complete from within the Brandle System.

As I sit down to write this, I can't even think of a working title. What I'm about to explore is not a fun topic but it's a conversation every executive knows is coming. The Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a series of events, which has destabilized markets and is affecting businesses, large and small, globally. The conclusion to draw is that layoffs are coming and crisis communication is going to be in play. Mitigating social media risks during company layoffs may not be your first crisis concern, but you will want a strategy to protect your global digital footprint and your brands.

Sue Serna loves dinosaurs but is not one - here at the Christmas Market in Paris December 2019

Brandle has some amazing customers and we are fortunate to be able to work with top-tier professionals at global companies. These social media governance professionals not only stay on top of changes with each social network, they also must stay on top of what is happening with their brands across the company and across the web. It's a difficult job that balances strategic thinking, risk management practices, marketing trade-offs and extreme detail (all while keeping an eye to any crisis that may arise).

One of our most advanced social media governance professionals is Sue Serna, global Social Media Lead at Cargill. In January, Sue wrote an excellent LinkedIn post titled:

"Don't be a dinosaur! 3 social media governance must-dos for companies of any size."

Serious social media governance leaders know that a crisis event is in their future.  A social media crisis is not an "if" but a "when" situation. So the real question is: are you and your corporation ready to take charge and mitigate the risks when it happens? Recently, the NFL was put to the test when the hacker group OurMine decided to wreak havoc with team and player social media accounts. It's a good time to think about that event and ask yourself if you and your corporation are prepared to manage a social media crisis event like the NFL accounts being hijacked by hackers?

Brandle, Inc., the pioneer of corporate social media governance, is pleased to announce our newest module for the Brandle Presence Manager — the Brandle Ad Accounts Manager. This module solves the challenges large enterprises face managing cross-platform ad accounts across the company and around the world.

We've all dealt with it; somebody grabbed your brand's name (or a variation thereof) and is holding it hostage on Twitter. Even worse, they could be misusing it as a counterfeit site phishing customers and sales. Getting that handle back can be tedious, expensive, and is not always successful. But there may be hope if that username is attached to an inactive Twitter account!

As reported by The Verge, Twitter started sending emails to the holders of accounts who had not signed in for six months or more:

A company’s digital brand presence is represented by the number of points of presence (POPs) –– social media accounts, web pages, micro pages, and digital profiles –– associated with that company. (Note, a company does not have to have control of a POP for it to be a part of its brand presence.) Some companies have a very large brand presence (or digital footprint), which contain hundreds, or even thousands, of POPs. But if the brand presence is disjointed, off-brand, or filled with rogue accounts, how strong can the customer experience (CX) be?

When it comes to brand presence management, a business’s employees are both an opportunity and a risk. On one hand, they can be your brand’s best ambassadors by promoting products and services to current and new audiences. On the other hand, they can also cause damage if they share protected information, intellectual property or even misinformation or damaging opinions.

The process of governing your digital landscape is a risk management practice that is never finished. The web is a fast-moving place and nothing in digital is static. This means that a quality governance program needs to quickly adapt to changes in social and digital environments as well as corporate priorities and policies. 

Social media governance is a two-pronged approach. The first aspect of social media governance relates to protecting a business’s brand from internal and external threats. The second is directed at improving brand reputation. Companies that focus on both of these areas will ultimately  protect and strengthen the corporate brand. This article will focus on how to optimize your brand reputation in four steps: 

At Brandle, we spend a lot of time guiding corporations on how to create a successful social media and digital governance plan. However, for real governance success, it is essential to prepare a digital governance foundation. Creating this foundation is the way to ensure executive support and global adherence to the plan! And working the plan is how the corporation can strengthen its digital brand reputation and reduce risks that may threaten brand health. While each company faces unique challenges in regard to digital governance and compliance, we see the greatest success with companies who first, prepare the groundwork, second, centralize governance, and third, introduce a corporate digital governance plan.  

This post will take you through the five elements to prepare the groundwork for a successful digital governance plan and program!

For most companies, brand reputation and recognition is a priority. And if you read global risk research, you know that "cyber risks" and "damage to brand reputation" continue to rank in the top risk concerns of global CEOs. (You can take a closer look at research by Deloitte, PwC and AON.) And when you are talking about brand reputation and cyber risks, you are talking about your branded digital footprint! 

Additionally, a significant portion of a CMO’s budget is allocated across digital channels and social relationships. So ensuring that these channels are secure, effective and monitored is critical. This is why digital governance programs are becoming a key function in major corporations.

What large corporations don’t know about their digital brand presence can hurt them. Corporations that conduct global business and have a global following are likely to have hundreds –– if not thousands –– of points of presence (POPs) that relate to their brand. And hundreds more POPs that they aren’t aware of. Sometimes these accounts are created by well-meaning fans. Other times, they’re made by counterfeiters or cybercriminals who are planning to damage a company’s sales (and brand reputation). In this post we’ll highlight four key benefits of discovering your unknown brand presence, and why it’s critical for your digital risk management practice. 

Facebook is making big changes, and as a result, businesses are going to be affected by them. In March, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook services would be moving toward a more privacy-focused model. Given the social media “climate” of the past several years we can agree that some changes are good, even though we feel the pain when it requires unplanned changed is our business activities. 

When it comes to social media compliance, omissions and oversights can prove almost as damaging as “active mistakes.” Investment firms and brokerages have to ensure that brand compliance is maintained at all times online. Running an audit of existing social media accounts is a great way to accomplish this. However, it can be easy to overlook certain aspects of social media governance. Here, we’ll provide a checklist to help corporate compliance professionals cover their bases and protect their brand reputation:

Brandle, Inc. was honored to present at the Incite Group Brand Marketing Summit last month. The Brand Marketing Summit brought together senior brand leaders from across the country for this two-day event in San Francisco. Presenters empowered hundreds of marketing leaders with strategic insights, best practices, and information on the latest marketing innovations. Brandle’s co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Janet Church, presented alongside other industry leaders from major corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Qualcomm.

Businesses in the mortgage and financial industries that commit social media compliance infractions face a number of issues including legal and regulatory concerns, loss of consumer trust, and deterioration of brand reputation. These businesses simply cannot afford to make mistakes in regard to regulatory compliance. In the ever-changing landscape of the web, avoiding social media compliance mistakes can be difficult; employees may unintentionally break from corporate and regulatory policy, and companies may not have the resources or tools to manage their digital presence effectively. Here, we’ll outline four major digital compliance mistakes that are common in mortgage companies and explain what your organization can do to prevent them.

Business mergers and acquisitions are complex and delicate transactions with many moving parts to the process. With so many business assets and liabilities in review it’s easy to forget about the details of the digital branded portfolio of the acquisition target.  However, it is a critical part of a company’s asset offering and often is a significant representation of a company’s intellectual property (IP). And if the acquiring company is not careful, it can quickly uncover that the digital assets are actually liabilities.

The bottom line: is the digital footprint of your target acquisition healthy and does it present a strong brand reputation to its customer base? And when these assets are transferred, can you secure, transfer and (hopefully) improve that brand reputation?

This post is intended to highlight the areas to watch for so you can say “YES” to each of those questions above!

We are excited to announce that the Brandle Presence Manager has added native support for the global social networks VK and Weibo.

This is great news for our global brand companies who need to discover, monitor and manage the digital presence of brands that are sold around the world!

Online compliance monitoring is the process of ensuring that all online properties relating to corporate brands are following policies, procedures, and regulations. For companies in a regulated industry, it is a critical risk management practice governed by national and state laws and regulations.

When it comes to online compliance monitoring, most businesses focus on their corporate-owned active social media properties on major networks (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter). But if you are a regulated business and only monitoring your corporate-owned social properties, you are placing your company at risk. And the risks can range from a simple statement of correction, to a fine, or even a major hit to brand reputation. Once a brand has experienced a reputation hit, regaining the trust of the customer is a difficult task that can take years. 

So how do you ensure you are covering all of the pieces of the online compliance monitoring puzzle?

There are many digital threat avenues for bad-actors to infiltrate a corporation and social media has become a favorite. Even though there are technology solutions (such as Brandle) that help corporations with these risks, it still takes constant oversight, monitoring, and forward thinking. One area that is often overlooked is employee social media training specifically around the topic of risk to the corporation. This falls into the category of corporate social media security and risk management.

Creating a strong training program to educate employees on the risks and pathways that hackers and phishers use is critical. Delivering the requirements employees must follow to assist with corporate social media security should be mandatory. There are six key requirements that should be part of your social media security training program.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a comprehensive European privacy law that took effect on May 25, 2018. Brandle views this law as an important step forward in streamlining personally identifiable information (PII) data protection requirements across the European Union. 

What is GDPR?

One of the most important things that organizations must understand about their social media governance plan is that it is not a static, unchanging document. Social media governance is a dynamic process that must be constantly monitored and optimized to ensure that it is steering the organization in the right direction. And the "right direction" is away from risks to corporate brand reputation and threats to data security.

To be truly proficient at social media governance, you need to know how to work your plan!

Before we lay out steps to simplify social media compliance, let's first define it! If you are part of a risk management team in a regulated industry, such as the financial sector, the term "social media compliance" centers around regulatory requirements. But that is only one aspect of compliance. There are other aspects of compliance for both regulated and non-regulated companies.

Social media compliance is a discipline within a broader social media governance program. It is the practice of ensuring that all corporate policies, regulatory requirements, brand standards, and social media standards are implemented and adhered to on all social accounts across all networks. This practice is broader than just regulatory compliance. Sure, regulatory compliance is critical, but brand damage often occurs when other corporate compliance standards are not met. And a regulatory audit might produce a warning for compliance correction (or fine), where brand damage can cost you customers and sales.

Executives must understand that in today’s business landscape, strong social media compliance is not just a best practice, it is an essential part of corporate risk management. 

January is always an excellent time to conduct the annual corporate social media and web presence audit. Accomplishing this key governance task early in the year allows the global digital team members to re-set goals on the most active corporate channels, as well as clean-up stale and rogue accounts that have popped up during the previous year (especially over the holiday period).

If you have never conducted a corporate social media audit, then now is the time to start! There are many reasons that social media presents significant risks to a company: brand reputation, sales, and risks highlighted in our post 7 Social Media Security Issues Your Business Faces. Proactively conducting a social media audit is not just a best practice, but an essential risk management priority.

Web presence management is the process of creating and maintaining a digital inventory of all web points-of-presence (POPs) including: social media accounts and pages, websites, blogs, and domains. At first glance, web presence management may seem primarily like an administrative task. However, it is actually a strategic process critical to managing risk events as well as keeping your brand standards and voice monitored accurately. Your digital footprint is often the main entry point for your customers to experience your brand, and if your customer has a negative experience with an online point-of-presence, then your brand reputation is in jeopardy.

To date, most companies' web presence management has been conducted by manual audits and tracked on static spreadsheets. This not only takes a lot of human resources, but it is also fraught with human error. Stepping up to a comprehensive SaaS solution that provides an automated process does require investment, but the cost trade-off vs the risk is well worth it. So how do you get the resources and support needed from your senior management? 

The first step is to become aware of the technology risks that concern your C-suite most. To that end, here are three keys to convince senior management of the importance of web presence management:

The field of Brand Protection has historically been relegated to those companies who produce products that are subject to counterfeit production. This includes popular consumer products and luxury goods.

However, the rise of social media popularity in business has fostered a counterfeit culture for accounts. In recent years, a growing number of businesses have wisely allocated resources towards social media brand protection, but the vast majority of businesses still have gaping vulnerabilities in their social media governance approach. If exposed, these vulnerabilities would inflict substantial reputation damage.

It's no secret that social media has become a major risk concern for corporations. According to a report by SentinelOne, over 80% of hacked companies reported that the attack entry points were from phishing emails and social media. Creating strong governance practices is essential to managing these social media security risks. Your brand reputation, data protection, and sales demand it!

As in any governance practice, it is helpful to gain an understanding of the potential threats. This is the only way that you can prevent, or at least, mitigate the attacks.

In this post, we highlight seven of the most common social media security issues.

A growing number of businesses of all sizes — from small startups to large enterprises — are tapping their workforce to extend their social media footprint. When this strategy is done correctly, the rewards and ROI are considerable. For example:

• Content shared by employees generate 800 percent more engagement than content shared by brand channels (Source: Social Media Today).
• Leads generated through employee social marketing convert 700 percent more frequently than other leads (Source: IBM).
• Brand messages posted or shared by employees are re-shared 24 times more frequently than brand messages posted or shared by businesses (Source: MSLGroup).
• Extending your brand standards and voice with employee social reach strengthens your brand recognition.

To monitor, or not to monitor? It is widely accepted by corporate social media and risk managers that major brand damage can occur via a social channel, but real harm can also come from employees’ social media accounts. For regulated companies, this is certainly true — in fact, they are legally required to monitor employee social media. But most companies should consider monitoring their employees key social accounts as a corporate risk and brand protection discipline.

Part of the corporate risk assessment (conducted by the risk team) should include an analysis of the risk profile presented by employee social media and whether a monitoring program is an important addition. If the risk profile is low, a monitoring program can be bypassed, if it is medium or high (such as a company that has a strong M&A practice or a large intellectual property portfolio), then this practice should be adopted. The monitoring program could focus on key employee types that are employed in a higher risk area, and not all employees. This certainly makes sense for very large corporations. However, every company should have a general employee social media policy that covers all employees.

When social media arrived on the business landscape the notion of governance and risk management was essentially non-existent. Social media has evolved from a basic customer touchpoint, into a critical business channel for communication, branding, support and sales. With this shift in importance, the risks to an enterprise have escalated. In fact, corporate CEOs consider damage to brand reputation due to the risks inherent in social media as their number one risk concern.

The corporate risks associated with “being social” range in severity from minor events (such as losing one customer due to poor communication on Facebook) to major events (such as counterfeit sites phishing your customers or an account hack that delivers harmful information). Just ask Dove or any of these other brands that have recently found themselves at the center of a firestorm! Even the networks themselves are at serious risk as in the recent Instagram hack. Due to heightened security and risk issues, social media governance has transitioned from an ad-hoc administrative task, to a critical discipline that is firmly part of the corporate risk management strategy.

Organizations in all sectors and industries must meet applicable compliance standards, such as the Fair Lending Laws, the Consumer Protection Act, and the CAN-SPAM Act. However, when it comes to social media governance, firms in the mortgage industry face an added compliance burden to adhere to the strict compliance and monitoring requirements outlined by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. These guidelines went into effect December 2013 with state requirements (some strict and some more lenient) following.

In theory, the FFIEC guidance was straightforward in helping protect the consumer and to reduce mortgage companies’ risks to fraudulent brand activity on the web. In practice, however, staying compliant, and keeping a solid compliance process, is quite a challenge! These are the challenges I work with every day:

If you’re looking to conduct a social media audit, know that you are ahead of many businesses when it comes to social media governance. As you probably already know, protecting your business from brand damage and PR crises can be made easier once you have evaluated all social media assets.

The adage “you cannot manage what you cannot measure” has many applications in today’s business world, including enterprise social media management. In fact, with social media, it’s even more challenging — you can’t manage or measure what you don’t know! And what you don’t know can hurt you.

The root of this problem is that most organizations — including small firms, but especially large enterprises — have a much larger social media footprint than they realize. Yes, everyone from the CEO to the intern may know about the flagship social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter. But what they typically don’t know is that while there are multiple business pages being managed on each of these platforms, there are also dozens — or sometimes hundreds — of other accounts that are dormant, unattended, or automatically created by the social network (such as Place pages). These accounts are all truly yours (they are not counterfeit accounts) and can become a significant risk to your corporate brand reputation.

To attract and secure customers in today’s competitive business landscape, it is essential for every company to deliver a consistent brand image. for success and survival. As mentioned in Forbes, “consistency is the key to successful branding and consistency goes beyond the product itself. The brand promise must be clear with every interaction each stakeholder experiences.” This consistency must extend to every social media presence that represents a company’s brands.

If a company has a social customer care, sales, or ambassador program, it should also extend to the people who manage those accounts as they are strongly relating to (and representing) the company’s brands.

Taking a social media inventory is a comprehensive process that includes discovering all corporate social media points-of-presence (POPs), so they can be assessed, organized, managed and secured appropriately. Below, we highlight the 3 key reasons why creating and monitoring social media inventory is critical, and should be integrated into the overall corporate risk strategy and plan.

• Most businesses have far more social media POPs — and therefore face much more risk — than they realize.

When starting a social media inventory, many business are surprised — or shocked — to discover that their brand names are emblazoned across dozens, hundreds or perhaps even thousands of web pages, platforms, forums, discussions boards and so on. This is often because accounts are set up spontaneously over time vs. in a strategic and structured process. It can also happen when many social media POPs are created by third parties without authorization or permission.  

The idea of stale social media accounts — i.e. accounts that have been created or registered, but remain unconfigured or unused — is not inherently bad or risky. In fact, many businesses establish a presence on various social media platforms for defensive reasons to prevent others (e.g. cyber criminals, counterfeiters, competitors, etc.) from using certain domains or social media handles. While these defensive measures are a smart strategy and a best practice, it’s important to monitor these stale accounts.

For every business that has a clear and updated awareness of its active and non-active Points-of-Presence (POPs), there are many more that do not know the size or scope of their social media footprint. Some companies could have hundreds (or thousands) of stale social media accounts that are not serving any defensive purpose. Instead of managing their digital brand footprint, they may be contributing to some or all of the following major risks:

The term “threat vector” is traditionally used in the cybersecurity and InfoSec space, and refers to vulnerabilities that expose organizational networks and endpoints (e.g. computers, laptops, employee-used smartphones, etc.), to malware, viruses, and other hazards.

However, the threat vector concept is just as important and applicable when it comes to web and social media governance. Cyber criminals, counterfeiters, rogue current employees, and disgruntled ex-employees are increasingly turning their attention to these digital points of presence — and compromising them with alarming ease. That’s the bad news.

Corporate social media concerns have progressed past the question of ROI as a marketing discipline and have landed squarely in the Risk Officers lap as a security concern. In fact, social media security is a serious risk for every corporation. Since 2011, cyber criminals have found a home on social media where they perpetuate fraud. During the past  six months, CIO Insight states that cyber criminals have increased 70% (and it does not appear to be slowing down). CIO Insights also states that worldwide security breach costs will grow from $3 Billion in 2015 to $6 Trillion in 2021. That's a lot of crime, and a lot of damage to your company!

To protect brands and reputation, companies must now ensure that their social media accounts are not gateways that expose them to costly threats. this means that you need to keep vigilant watch for cyber risks, including:

As discussed by Brandle’s founder CEO Chip Roberson in a recent Forbes article, social media governance is a coordinated set of procedures, protocols, policies, workflows and tools. An organization should know what to rely on in order to ensure that valuable digital assets (social media accounts and websites) are secured, risks are mitigated, and compliance is maintained. 

However, in order to activate a robust social media governance plan, a critical question that large brand companies and multi-site organizations must address is whether to centralize this function, or to allocate authority and responsibility to various local entities (e.g. international offices, regional centers, retail stores, franchisees, etc).

The issue of rogue social media accounts has been in the mainstream news lately, with revelations about false Twitter accounts for various government agencies such as the EPA, NPS and NASA.

However, businesses that consider themselves safely outside of the rogue social media fray because they haven’t yet been targeted – or they feel that they’re too small to capture the attention of adversaries -- need to think again. Social media is quickly becoming one of the largest corporate risk sources for fines, lawsuits and lasting reputation damage.  

Below, we highlight the most common – and indeed, costliest – ways that more businesses each year discover the unpleasant truth about rogue social media accounts:

Corporations spend millions of dollars a year to increase their visibility and mindshare on social media. However, there are times when companies stand out on social media for all of the wrong reasons. Some notorious examples spring to mind:

• The numerous United Airlines issues highlighting poor customer service.
• Nivea figuring that it would be a good idea to launch a campaign around the tagline “white is purity.”
• Pepsi’s recent Kendall Jenner ad where she brings a can of pepsi to a police officer at a protest, undermining Black Lives Matter protests across the U.S.

Now that social media is a widely accepted marketing channel to connect with consumers, executives have progressively elevated their concerns about the risks and the potential damage this technology can present to their companies. In fact, AON’s Global Risk Management Survey 2017 lists risk to brand reputation via social media as their number one risk concern.

It is no longer satisfactory to assume that the web is impossible to control — with the right tools and team, it is not only possible to control a corporate brand presence and social media ecosystem, it is necessary. But in order to make all of this risk management happen, a solid social media governance program needs to be created, adopted across the enterprise, and implemented. Like all risk management programs, there needs to be buy-in from the top and there needs to be a corporate-wide commitment to the ongoing discipline that successful social media governance requires.

Social media governance has become a new focus for the social enterprise. This governance practice is all about managing risks to the corporation (that might arise from social media) and maintaining brand standards and reputation across the social networks. Building the right social media governance team is critical to being successful.

Governance over social media is a difficult task. It is generally very detailed work that is ever-changing due to the ever-changing nature of the social networks and the fluidity of engagement. Strong governance needs to be applied cross-company, and spearheading training and process with multiple department heads can be challenging. To be successful at this governance practice, we recommend a two-tiered team approach : the core social media governance team and the extended team.

This post helps you define the team roles and gives you a start on determining your process for cross-company governance communication.

 I recently read an article in The Drum by Seb Joseph. The article focuses on how Coca-Cola, a mature social company, has created their new North American Social Centre to have central social media marketing of their brands. Seb describes the Social Centre as: 

"... a real-time newsroom to manage social media marketing for all the Coca-Cola trademarked brands (think Diet Coke, Fanta and Sprite). Staffed by 55 people, including marketers from Coca-Cola North America alongside executives from agencies Possible, Havas and Publicis-owned Moxie, they are focused on listening and analytics, content strategy, creation and publishing, community management, marketing science, legal and media buying."

This is really fantastic, especially since Coca-Cola has lead the way in strong storytelling on social, but there is a huge missing discipline in the Coca-Cola Social Centre.

We are pleased to announce the release of our new e-book — The Social Media Governance Plan. A Guide to Implement a Global Risk Management Process for Your Social Enterprise.

This e-book was written by Janet Church of Brandle, and highlights the steps that are essential for corporate-wide acceptance of a social media governance plan and process. 

For over four years, the Brandle Team has been focused on how we can make social media governance and web presence management as easy as possible for companies with a larger portfolio of brands and social media ecosystems. When you spend that much time thinking about (and working with customers on) governance, risk management, and the global structure of an enterprise, you learn a lot! And now we are sharing the knowledge.

Here is what you will learn in this e-book:

If you are the person ultimately responsible for enterprise-wide social media governance, then you know how challenging it can be to conduct a social media audit. The first challenge is getting all departments to agree on the key requirements that should be included in the audit in order to protect the company from digital risks. The second challenge is getting the time and resources dedicated to conduct the audit and produce meaningful reports that demonstrate strong social media governance! 

If you have managed to overcome these two challenges and have actually produced a social media audit, the last thing you want to hear is that there are errors or omissions in the audit criteria and final reports.

At Brandle, we not only conduct automated audits every day, but we also see the past audits of companies attempting to update or correct previous manual audit efforts. This post highlights five top social media audit errors or omissions that we see in enterprise brand presence audits. Be sure to include these elements in your next audit to secure your brand presence across the web. 

For each item highlighted, we have placed a High, Medium or Low rating for CORPORATE RISK LEVEL and for FREQUENCY of the occurrence.

We hope this helps you have a higher degree of confidence that you are implementing strong social media governance and social media risk management.

All around us, the world seems to be going “mobile first”. Given almost all of us walk around with a powerful computer in our pocket, that’s not terribly surprising. However, if you’re an enterprise trying to keep track of each corporate web presence, new mobile-only apps like Snapchat and Peach may be causing you some frustration. 

How do you find and keep track of the accounts your employees may be creating to represent (or protect) your products and brands? It’s not like there is an obvious URL one can type into a browser to go to the app as the whole user experience happens on the phone.

However, all is not lost.

While it may seem that each mobile app is an island to itself, that’s usually not true – especially when the app is just getting started. When the app is young, it focuses mainly on building an audience and that requires a streamlined sign-up and invitation process.

This post is the fourth and final entry of our series on how to create and manage a successful Social Media Governance Plan. At this point, you know that your key focus is to mitigate risks for your company that may arise from social media. The main risks that C-suite executives are concerned with are brand reputation damage and technology threats. (See our post on Understanding Key Corporate Risks for more details on C-Suite risk concerns.)

Controlling social media risks is all about creating a solid Social Media Governance Plan and maintaining an ongoing governance process. This series lays out a "best practice" outline that you can use for your company — just customize it to address specific concerns of your company and your industry. 

In Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and  of this blog series, we focused on the first eight steps of your plan:

1. Gather the Corporate Stakeholders of Social Media Governance, and
2. Review Corporate Risk Management Priorities
3. Review the Corporate Goals for Social Media Governance
4. Analyze Previous Successes, Failures, and Changes
5. Social Media, Employment, and Industry Law and Regulation Review
6. Review Corporate Social Media Policy
7. Social Network Participation and Risk Review
8. Discovery — Social Media Audit Process 

This is the final post in the series and we will highlight the five steps for processes and procedures of Social Media Governance. 

If you have been following this blog series on how to create a Social Media Governance Plan, you know that the key goal is to mitigate risks for your company. Research shows that corporations consider reputation damage as the most crucial risk concern with technology threats in the top ten.

Social media risks fall under both of these risk concerns, so creating a solid plan and ongoing governance process is certainly a "best practice" for every company. It also is critical to ensure the plan ties into the overall corporate risk management program.

In Part 1 of this blog series, we focused on the first two steps to prepare your plan:

• Gather the Corporate Stakeholders of Social Media Governance, and
• Review Corporate Risk Management Priorities

In Part 2, we focused on steps three through six:

• Review the Corporate Goals for Social Media Governance
• Analyze Previous Successes, Failures, and Changes
• Social Media, Employment, and Industry Law and Regulation Review
• Review Corporate Social Media Policy

Social media governance is an ongoing process with the primary goal of mitigating risks for your company. Research shows that corporations consider reputation damage as the most crucial risk concern with technology threats in the top ten. Social media risks fall under both of these risk concerns. 

To be successful at managing social media risks, it is critical to have a Social Media Governance Plan in place and to work the plan. It is also critical to ensure the plan ties into the overall corporate risk management program.

Whether you are creating your first Social Media Governance Plan or updating your current one, you need to make sure you cover all of the elements that are important to your company.

In Part 1 of this blog series, we focused on the first steps to prepare for your plan creation:

1.  Gather the Corporate Stakeholders of Social Media Governance, and

2.  Review Corporate Risk Management Priorities

When was the last time you updated your corporate social media governance plan and ensured all aspects of the plan are current, effective, and well-communicated? 

As we stated in our last blog post, research firms have listed risk to brand reputation as the #1 risk concern of global c-level executives, and risks arising from technology in the top 10. Social media can be an in-road for both of these risk concerns. This is why your Social Media Governance Plan is a critical part of the corporate risk program.

We know ... creating an effective corporate-wide plan can feel like a tremendous weight on your shoulders. But reacting to a social media risk event without a plan is a much bigger weight! So to help lighten the load, we're getting you started with a general direction of an effective Social Media Governance Plan. 

Throughout the year we keep our eyes focused on the service firms that conduct research on risk factors facing the C-level suite of global enterprises. Because social media can spread so quickly, the C-suite and the Boardroom have to consider how a major risk event will either stem from or play out on the web. Which means the people leading the digital and social media team need to have strong web presence governance in place to effectively manage these risk concerns.

Now that it is 2016, it's a good time to take a look at last year's risk research and consider what is top of mind for global CEO's. We believe this perspective can help you gain a general understanding of corporate risks and prepare you to have better conversations about the specific risks that your own CEO is concerned about for your company. Why? Because understanding your company's key risk concerns is the first step to developing an effective social media governance plan.

This post highlights the 2015 Global Risk Management research conducted by AON, Deloitte, Protiviti (conducted by North Caroline University), and the US CEO Outlook 2015 by KPMG. The top findings you need to consider for your 2016 risk plan for web presence management and social media governance:

• Damage to Reputation/Brand is the #1 global risk concern in most research.
• Regulatory and Compliance concerns top all research reports, and
• Disruptive Technology and Cyberthreats play prominently for all industries.

Nick Hayes of Forrester has just published the December, 2015 report for Security and Risk Professionals. The title of the report is TechRadar^TM: Risk Management, Q4.

In this Forrester report, Nick identifies the thirteen most important technology and service categories for risk management at various stages of market maturity, business value, and user adoption.

Hayes raises several issues/opportunities/risks/practices to consider in this report and we recommend it to anyone in the C-suite or who is tasked with managing risk to the enterprise.

Brandle Tips is a series of posts that highlight features and functions of the Brandle Presence Manager. We hope to make learning easier for our customers and to show other readers how easy web presence management can be!

Today's Brandle Tip is all about the Inventory Monitoring Column and how Brandle automatically monitors your social media profiles. When there is a monitoring issue, Brandle will email you the issues as well as present them in the Monitoring Column of the Inventory table. 

The key events that Brandle is presenting in the Monitoring Column are:

• Profile Change Detection (Included with Brandle Presence Manager)
• Compliance Criteria Failure (Included with the Compliance Module)

Each key event has multiple options that may be presented, and they all should be reviewed by a member of your Account Team. Once reviewed, the team member should either process the changes with the point-of-presence (POP) contact or approve the change and dismiss the issue. The rest of this post takes you through the steps.

LEAVE IT TO FACEBOOK...

...to randomly change the ground under your feet. Of all the things which are important to your business' web presence, the addresses people use to find you is near the top of the list. Lose your URL and you can become invisible.

However, URLs pose another problem which most businesses don't take into consideration: the fact that you can have too many URLs for the same web property. And now it seems that Facebook has decided to give your business page one more.

Big deal, you might say? Well if you're a large organization with lots of brands or locations, your problems just got multiplied...

It's been almost two years since the FFIEC has issued its final guidance on social media for all businesses supervised by the CFPB. We've spent a lot of time talking about how regulated businesses can create social media governance programs and we've offered tips and ideas along the way for attaining social media compliance for mortgage companies. 

In our blog post Social Media Compliance & Your Sales Team: 6 Steps to Success, we suggest a process to help secure compliance with your loan officers. Step number five of that process is to "train your sales staff". One of the best ways to train employees on social media compliance is to give them examples and guidelines on what, exactly, you would like them to do with their social media accounts! 

Primary Residential Mortgage, Inc., one of Brandle's customers, has created Social Media Guidelines and Requirements for their loan officers to receive step-by-step instructions. The beauty of the document is that it is simple, gives an illustrated example for each approved social media site, and lists the compliance requirements on each page. PRMI is kind enough to let us share this "best practice" example of how to help loan officers with compliance and good brand standards! Perhaps it will help you with your training program for your "social sales team".

In every industry, good sales and marketing professionals seek external data to support marketing ideas and business decisions. That is doubly true in a regulated industry, like financial services, where a decision could cost the company high compliance fines. So when external data is available, such as meaningful survey results showing social media industry trends, it's a great idea to leverage the findings to update, change, or confirm your existing social media programs.

Recently, Putnam Investments and Socialware conducted social media use surveys among advisors in financial services firms. In this article, I present highlights of the Putnam survey and more detail on the Socialware study.

The biggest data point from the Putnam Investment study that demonstrates why you should ramp up your social media program for advisors is: 

• The share of advisors acquiring new clients through social media is up sharply to 79% (from 66% in 2014), with the average annual asset gain from these clients standing at $4.6 million.

The top findings in Socialware's Social Media Trends survey are:

• 48% of advisors are allowed to create their own social media posts, as well as share pre-approved content
• The top challenges center around social media risk management 
• 39% of firms still have no ROI metrics to assess social media program success 

We hope you find information in this article to help you navigate the chasm of corporate risk and build a bridge to social media success!

One of the more difficult challenges for the corporate team responsible for social media governance is the task of monitoring the web presence activities of the sales team. The challenge is even greater when you have a distributed and large sales force. And if you are in a regulated industry (such as mortgage, finance, insurance, or pharma), the job is critical to the regulatory compliance of the company!

I recently got a call from one of our mortgage customers asking if I could recommend best practices to manage a distributed sales team so the company could demonstrate corporate-wide social media compliance. He commented that he felt like he was "herding cats". I was happy to guide him through the process I recommend and I thought others might benefit as well. Additionally, I get to use a photo of really cute kittens in a blog post (attentively gathered for training and monitoring).

In this article, I outline a sound process to help you manage web presence compliance for a social sales staff. Although I do highlight procedures for companies in regulated industries, these steps can be followed by any company so that you can get the most out of your social sales team while managing risks for your company.  

As usual in business (and herding), it comes down to the adage, "Make the Plan....Work the Plan". Successful social media compliance is all about implementing best practices for governance, leveraging corporate brand marketing, and training your sales team how to "be social".

If my headline caught your attention, then I'm betting you are responsible for advertising and social media compliance in a regulated business. You may be in the financial sector (a mortgage, securities, or banking company) or other regulated industry (like a pharmaceutical or medical business), but the challenge of selecting the right solution for your web and social media governance program is the same for everyone:

What tool do I need to achieve corporate web and social media compliance?

There are three tools you need to consider to run a good compliance process. Once you understand the web and social media tools landscape for regulated businesses, you will know which tool is your priority starting point.

Are you responsible for managing, publishing, listening, or analyzing the data from your corporate social media properties?  If you spend part of your work day focused on any of these activities, then you are using at least one Social Media Management System!

The growth of Social Media in the corporate environment has created a large market for different tools that help you achieve different goals. Most people start with a publishing tool, but a new tool category is emerging called Web Presence Management which addresses the key needs of corporate web and social media governance.

Is it time your company adopts a Presence Manager?

According to a 2013 report by the Altimeter Group at least 13 different departments within the enterprise have a stake in the corporate social media presence alone. However, what each group imagines when they talk about corporate web presence may vary widely. Are they concerned about trademark protection (e.g. legal), or managing registrations for corporate domain names (e.g. IT), or all the product and campaign points-of-presence (e.g Marketing and PR)? It is even possible your colleague might alter her answer based on what she thinks you need to hear, due to your role. 

Most businesses today lack a comprehensive and consistent inventory of their corporate web presence and that is partly because the world has been changing so quickly that few have had time to agree upon a common definition of "corporate web presence." 

So, let's fix that.

Many companies now disclose domain names as part of the due diligence process of a corporate merger or acquisition but social media is often an afterthought...and a painful one. Fortunately, the legal profession is starting to take note as evidenced by this insightful article, "Acquisitions: Are you doing your #duediligence?", by Siobhán Langwade and Kate Schmit of Stevens & Bolton LLP.

In the year and half we've been offering the Brandle Presence Manager as a platform for discovering and inventorying a corporate social media footprint, we have discovered:

• Companies consistently and greatly underestimate the size of the corporate web presence.
• No company has a single, complete and accurate inventory of their web properties.
• Headquarters often does not know which employees created and/or manages which properties.
• Credentials (passwords) are often not centrally managed nor available for all properties.
• Control of these accounts is at greater risk of being lost post acquisition and regaining control can be a painful, slow and relatively expensive process.
• Once the acquisition is complete, this becomes the headache of the acquiring company.

Social media accounts are intangible property and now an important part of the list of assets for the target company. Here’s how to secure the social media properties as part of the merger and acquisition due diligence process.

Many companies come to us with the request "Can you run a social media audit so we can update our spreadsheet(s)?" While the answer is "Yes, we can..." there is a very big caveat: "... but your data will be out of date very quickly.”  

Unfortunately, social media is not like an email address or phone number which the company can control who gets one, when and for how long. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. all operate by their own rules. Anybody, inside or outside your company can create a new (or modify an existing) social media presence (or new domain) that purports to represent your business...and this can happen on a daily basis. which makes auditing your social media presence a challenge.

The challenge with conducting an audit for web and social media accounts is that the web is a dynamic world and a single audit that produces a static spreadsheet is out of date the moment it is completed.

For good digital and social media governance, you need to perform a continual audit that produces a dynamic inventory!

It’s always a challenge to keep up with the compliance issues, audits, examples, and trends that occur daily in each regulated industry. For the Mortgage Industry, I have a go-to source: Rob Chrisman’s Daily Mortgage News & Commentary blog. Because Brandle solves the challenges of social media risk management and social media compliance, I’m most interested in regulation and commentary around these topics. And when the topic is targeted specifically on social media compliance for mortgage companies, you know that the CFPB is part of the conversation!

In today’s post, Rob presented some interesting information on the CFPB and compliance regulation from an article written by Margaret Wright with CliftonLarsonAllen, LLP. The article was originally posted on Banker’s Advisory Compliance Monitor. This information has motivated me to ask our Mortgage customers: What is your corporate risk exposure regarding social media compliance and consumer complaints?

Over the last 6 months we've seen several large enterprises make commitments to incorporate social media into their governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices. As a result, digital teams are coming to us with mandates and deadlines to inventory, review and remediate their enterprise's global web and social footprint. This appears to be a harbinger of a sea change in how the C-suite addresses the risks and rewards of social media – in other words, social media governance.

With the new social network Ello getting 30,000-40,000 signup requests per hour, the platform has attracted our interest at Brandle. As you may know, our Brandle Presence Manager helps companies discover and track points-of-presence on the web where their enterprise appears to be represented, so this mad rush to create accounts made us wonder "who is really on this network?"

Taming Your Enterprise Social Media Presence

Your boss has just asked you to inventory all the social media accounts used across the enterprise. On the surface, enterprise social media account management may sound simple to your boss but you know it's nothing but.... That's because social media points-of-presence (POPs) can be created by anyone at any time without any form of control or oversight by you or your team.

When used properly, web and social media sites are powerful marketing tools which can bring customers to your door; however, they can also bring the regulators knocking. The FFIEC has finalized its guidance on the use of social media by financial institutions and the CFPB has started the door-knocking. Factor in the use of social media by mortgage loan originators (MLOs), which you are also required to monitor, and the compliance challenge is escalated. Now state regulators (for example WA, TX, CA and AZ) are getting more aggressive in overseeing the use of social media and are sending out "intent to audit" letters. Are you prepared to meet the challenge of an audit?

Every few years technology evolves and something wondrous emerges that affects businesses and consumers in a significant way. Often, the new technology replaces an existing technology, or even makes it obsolete. In some cases, it has a major impact on how an enterprise shifts its IT focus to better serve its customers and shareholders. We’ve come to know these impactful technologies as “disruptive.” The most significant “disruptive technology” of the past ten years has been social media; not just for the platforms themselves, but because it takes a significant shift in business culture and operational excellence to incorporate it effectively. In fact, it takes a transformation.

To successfully use social media in an enterprise often requires support from the C-Suite. However, when it comes to getting buy-in from the C-level execs, the argument is often "What's the Social Media ROI?" That's certainly a reasonable question but it should not be the only question that is asked. Here's why.

This morning I awoke to a private message from an old and distant friend. I don't hear from her very often so this caught my attention. Why was she reaching out to me?

It turns out she had just received a friend request from me via Facebook. I thought this was odd since we're already "friends". I mean, we were talking over Facebook at that very moment! Fortunately, she was skeptical enough to double check with me as this didn't seem right.

Every industry has adopted social media at different levels and each industry analysis shows a particular pattern of performance with social media. Regulated industries, such as the Mortgage Industry, have the additional burden of keeping their employees’ and agents’ points of presence (POPs) compliant as well as their own branded POPs. Today, we see every industry, regulated or not, jumping heavily into social media.

If you have been following my Social Media Governance series, you know that I have introduced new terms and laid out several processes to help you strengthen your Social Media Governance plan. The last post was all about conducting an effective audit and creating a solid inventory. In this post, Part 3 of the series, I will highlight how you maintain brand equity and reduce corporate risk as a social enterprise. It's all about monitoring what you know, looking for what you don't know, and implementing the governance needed at any given time.

Last week I began a series on Social Media Governance with the first post titled 3 Keys to Managing Your Social Footprint. In that post I stressed the distinction between social presence governance and social content governance. For a decade people have focused their governance concerns on what can and cannot be said within the content stream of social networks, placing guidelines in a corporate social media policy. This is social content governance.

Every New Year you naturally begin setting goals and making plans to achieve new heights in your career and personal life. You know that the best way to reach (and exceed) goals is to make a plan, follow it, and adjust when necessary. This is true whether you want to get a handle on those holiday pounds or get a handle on your brand presence in social media.

HIPAA - those are five letters that keep healthcare compliance and risk officers awake at night.

As we've explored before, a business of any size is going to be challenged to stay on top of its social footprint. When we've run social presence audits for hospital networks, we usually find a multitude of social media "points of presence" including those for the corporate brand, individual hospitals, specialty centers, departments, programs, campaigns, doctors, nurses and even the gift shop!

Quickly! Think about how you manage your social media.

I bet what came to mind was some collection of content publishing, listening, or analysis systems. If you're in a regulated industry then perhaps a content compliance or archiving system might have come to mind.

What's the common denominator? Content. That's not a bad thing since sharing content is why we're on social media. However, we're overlooking a fundamental component – Presence!

Dear Big Retail CMO, is Social coming between you and your stores?

Does it feel like employees are reading from a different social play book...working at cross purposes?

As the CMO, you probably see social as something best left to the team at HQ to communicate the big brand messages. You may even consider social media at the store level as something unruly, that "doesn't move the needle," and which brings unwanted brand risk. However, your store managers probably look at it differently. From their point of view they are responsible for driving sales to their stores and who knows your local customers better than the local team? So, your store managers probably see social media as something which can "move the needle" for their store.

It predates the rise of "social business" but one of the most compelling and useful business books I've read is Andy Grove's "Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company". I read it when it came out in 1996 and its wisdom – particularly around "strategic inflection points" – has never left me:

In social media, what is a "point of presence" (aka a POP)?

Simply put, it's a general way of trying to reference the various sites, blogs, accounts, pages, boards, channels, streams, etc. that can represent someone or something online. In trying to reference all these various places where a brand – personal or corporate – may be be represented, it was challenging to find one word that can stand in for all those thingumajigs.

At this stage of the social game, most companies (of all sizes) have their arms around using social media as part of their brand marketing strategy and community development. But moving your company into operating as a true Social Business is a game changer! Strong brand presence management is required in order to scale your organization, protect your intellectual property, strengthen your security measures, and reduce liability risks. And you need to care about it!

We are ecstatic here at Brandle, Inc.! It was just over one year ago that Chip Roberson (our fearless CEO) and I sat down to discuss some new ideas to help tame the Web chaos that social media had created. Given our professional histories are in enterprise technology solutions, we decided to focus on the challenges facing brands. Chip had a few really good ideas and one brilliant one we called Brandle, which is a mash-up of brand + handle. We called Ed (our equally fearless Director of Engineering) and then the three of us spent the next two months at a whiteboard modeling out the product and discussing use cases. We tested the idea with some friends who manage social media for some major enterprises and we got a resounding “YES” to the question: “Does this solve a major pain point for you?” We then passed it by our BOD member Jim Levy (who has been with us since we were Socialogue, the predecessor to Brandle) who made the statement "This is big...really BIG".