Brandle Social Media Governance Blog

4 min read

Why Social Media Brand Protection is More Important Than Ever

By Janet Church on November 30, 2017

The field of Brand Protection has historically been relegated to those companies who produce products that are subject to counterfeit production. This includes popular consumer products and luxury goods.

However, the rise of social media popularity in business has fostered a counterfeit culture for accounts. In recent years, a growing number of businesses have wisely allocated resources towards social media brand protection, but the vast majority of businesses still have gaping vulnerabilities in their social media governance approach. If exposed, these vulnerabilities would inflict substantial reputation damage.

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7 min read

Top 5 Social Media Audit Mistakes!

By Janet Church on May 26, 2016

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.

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10 min read

Social Media Governance: Protect Your Company from Social Media Risks! Part 2

By Janet Church on January 21, 2016


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

This post (Part 2) continues with the items you need to consider for your Social Media Governance Plan. 

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2 min read

The C-Suite Demands Social Media Governance

By Janet Church on May 22, 2015

Over the last 6 months we've seen several large enterprises make commitments to incorporate social media into their governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices. As a result, digital teams are coming to us with mandates and deadlines to inventory, review and remediate their enterprise's global web and social footprint. This appears to be a harbinger of a sea change in how the C-suite addresses the risks and rewards of social media – in other words, social media governance.

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11 min read

A List of Brands on Ello

By Chip Roberson on October 20, 2014

With the new social network Ello getting 30,000-40,000 signup requests per hour, the platform has attracted our interest at Brandle. As you may know, our Brandle Presence Manager helps companies discover and track points-of-presence on the web where their enterprise appears to be represented, so this mad rush to create accounts made us wonder "who is really on this network?"

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6 min read

Enterprise Social Media Account Management

By Chip Roberson on August 20, 2014

Taming Your Enterprise Social Media Presence

Your boss has just asked you to inventory all the social media accounts used across the enterprise. On the surface, enterprise social media account management may sound simple to your boss but you know it's nothing but.... That's because social media points-of-presence (POPs) can be created by anyone at any time without any form of control or oversight by you or your team.

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7 min read

Social Media Compliance for the Mortgage Industry

By Janet Church on August 11, 2014

When used properly, web and social media sites are powerful marketing tools which can bring customers to your door; however, they can also bring the regulators knocking. The FFIEC has finalized its guidance on the use of social media by financial institutions and the CFPB has started the door-knocking. Factor in the use of social media by mortgage loan originators (MLOs), which you are also required to monitor, and the compliance challenge is escalated. Now state regulators (for example WA, TX, CA and AZ) are getting more aggressive in overseeing the use of social media and are sending out "intent to audit" letters. Are you prepared to meet the challenge of an audit?

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4 min read

Brand Disrupted: How Social Media and Brand Protection Technology Converged

By Janet Church on May 15, 2014

Every few years technology evolves and something wondrous emerges that affects businesses and consumers in a significant way. Often, the new technology replaces an existing technology, or even makes it obsolete. In some cases, it has a major impact on how an enterprise shifts its IT focus to better serve its customers and shareholders. We’ve come to know these impactful technologies as “disruptive.” The most significant “disruptive technology” of the past ten years has been social media; not just for the platforms themselves, but because it takes a significant shift in business culture and operational excellence to incorporate it effectively. In fact, it takes a transformation.

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3 min read

Social media ROI vs. Opportunity Cost

By Chip Roberson on April 23, 2014

To successfully use social media in an enterprise often requires support from the C-Suite. However, when it comes to getting buy-in from the C-level execs, the argument is often "What's the Social Media ROI?" That's certainly a reasonable question but it should not be the only question that is asked. Here's why.

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2 min read

Why Social Media Security & Authenticity Require Vigilance

By Chip Roberson on April 15, 2014

This morning I awoke to a private message from an old and distant friend. I don't hear from her very often so this caught my attention. Why was she reaching out to me?

It turns out she had just received a friend request from me via Facebook. I thought this was odd since we're already "friends". I mean, we were talking over Facebook at that very moment! Fortunately, she was skeptical enough to double check with me as this didn't seem right.

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