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.