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.