January is always an excellent time to conduct the annual corporate social media and web presence audit. Accomplishing this key governance task early in the year allows the global digital team members to re-set goals on the most active corporate channels, as well as clean-up stale and rogue accounts that have popped up during the previous year (especially over the holiday period).

If you have never conducted a corporate social media audit, then now is the time to start! There are many reasons that social media presents significant risks to a company: brand reputation, sales, and risks highlighted in our post 7 Social Media Security Issues Your Business Faces. Proactively conducting a social media audit is not just a best practice, but an essential risk management priority.

If you’re looking to conduct a social media audit, know that you are ahead of many businesses when it comes to social media governance. As you probably already know, protecting your business from brand damage and PR crises can be made easier once you have evaluated all social media assets.

 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

When was the last time you updated your corporate social media governance plan and ensured all aspects of the plan are current, effective, and well-communicated? 

As we stated in our last blog post, research firms have listed risk to brand reputation as the #1 risk concern of global c-level executives, and risks arising from technology in the top 10. Social media can be an in-road for both of these risk concerns. This is why your Social Media Governance Plan is a critical part of the corporate risk program.

We know ... creating an effective corporate-wide plan can feel like a tremendous weight on your shoulders. But reacting to a social media risk event without a plan is a much bigger weight! So to help lighten the load, we're getting you started with a general direction of an effective Social Media Governance Plan. 

Throughout the year we keep our eyes focused on the service firms that conduct research on risk factors facing the C-level suite of global enterprises. Because social media can spread so quickly, the C-suite and the Boardroom have to consider how a major risk event will either stem from or play out on the web. Which means the people leading the digital and social media team need to have strong web presence governance in place to effectively manage these risk concerns.

Now that it is 2016, it's a good time to take a look at last year's risk research and consider what is top of mind for global CEO's. We believe this perspective can help you gain a general understanding of corporate risks and prepare you to have better conversations about the specific risks that your own CEO is concerned about for your company. Why? Because understanding your company's key risk concerns is the first step to developing an effective social media governance plan.

This post highlights the 2015 Global Risk Management research conducted by AON, Deloitte, Protiviti (conducted by North Caroline University), and the US CEO Outlook 2015 by KPMG. The top findings you need to consider for your 2016 risk plan for web presence management and social media governance:

• Damage to Reputation/Brand is the #1 global risk concern in most research.
• Regulatory and Compliance concerns top all research reports, and
• Disruptive Technology and Cyberthreats play prominently for all industries.

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.