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?

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.

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.

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:

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.