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.

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