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".