Brandle Social Media Governance Blog

5 min read

Brandle Adds New Social Media Monitoring and Compliance Features

By Janet Church on April 30, 2020

Brandle is excited to announce POP POSTS, our new content monitoring feature of the Brandle Presence Manager GRC Module. Since our launch in 2011, we have always monitored the profile content on the social media properties. Our focus was to discover and monitor the representation of the social property to catch bad actors creating counterfeit sites and to discover stale POPs (points-of-presence) that our customers needed to remove from their digital footprint. We left the content stream to publishing and listening platforms. But as social media governance and compliance needs have grown, our customers have requested that we expand our compliance features to the content stream (also called "post" area) of social media. Now, Brandle proudly boasts that POP Posts for the Brandle Presence Manager delivers comprehensive social media monitoring and compliance for all content in social media!

Continue Reading
3 min read

2 Tools for Social Media Security and Team Transitions

By Janet Church on April 08, 2020

During this challenging time of working-from-home, we are all trying to stay motivated and focused to produce the work that can make a difference in the world. Eventually, we and our co-workers will return to the office and the work we do now will help us transition into the business that will be required of us later. At this time, the visibility of what may be "required" is foggy at best, but for those of us in the social media governance space, we do know that the digital world is not slowing down. In fact, social media security is more critical than ever with bad actors taking advantage of consumer fears and political campaigns lying in wait.

Continue Reading
3 min read

Brandle Tasks! Easier Governance for Remote Workers

By Janet Church on March 19, 2020

We are fortunate that much of the Tech industry is able to work from home during our current Covid-19 pandemic. Brandle fully supports our employees to be remote workers during this time, and we are ready to help our customers in anyway we can. This is why we turned our attention to release a new feature set called Tasks

We know that teams get into their own work rhythm inside a company. Managing team duties and tasks around social media and digital governance can be more complicated when everyone is working from home. So we decided to create some features to make it easier for remote workers. Brandle Tasks has been on the development roadmap, but we expedited the code and testing this past week to help our customers who are newly working from home. This feature is offered to all of our customers at no additional fee.

Brandle Tasks can now help you manage team responsibilities, track specific tasks, and mark them as complete from within the Brandle System.

Continue Reading
4 min read

Mitigating Social Media Risks During Company Layoffs

By Chip Roberson on March 11, 2020

As I sit down to write this, I can't even think of a working title. What I'm about to explore is not a fun topic but it's a conversation every executive knows is coming. The Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a series of events, which has destabilized markets and is affecting businesses, large and small, globally. The conclusion to draw is that layoffs are coming and crisis communication is going to be in play. Mitigating social media risks during company layoffs may not be your first crisis concern, but you will want a strategy to protect your global digital footprint and your brands.

Continue Reading
7 min read

3 Social Media Governance Essentials

By Janet Church on March 09, 2020

Sue Serna loves dinosaurs but is not one - here at the Christmas Market in Paris December 2019

Brandle has some amazing customers and we are fortunate to be able to work with top-tier professionals at global companies. These social media governance professionals not only stay on top of changes with each social network, they also must stay on top of what is happening with their brands across the company and across the web. It's a difficult job that balances strategic thinking, risk management practices, marketing trade-offs and extreme detail (all while keeping an eye to any crisis that may arise).

One of our most advanced social media governance professionals is Sue Serna, global Social Media Lead at Cargill. In January, Sue wrote an excellent LinkedIn post titled:

"Don't be a dinosaur! 3 social media governance must-dos for companies of any size."

We thought it would be a great review for Brandle readers, and I have received permission from Sue to share her post here. She got the idea for the post after  speaking with a student about social media governance. 
Continue Reading
3 min read

Why Social Media Risk Management is About More than Handling a PR Crisis

By Janet Church on June 06, 2017

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.
Continue Reading
1 min read

New E-book: How to Create a Corporate Social Media Governance Plan

By Janet Church on June 14, 2016

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:

Continue Reading
8 min read

Successful Social Media Governance — Make a Plan & Work the Plan!

By Janet Church on March 02, 2016

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 1Part 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. 

Continue Reading
9 min read

Prepare for Your Corporate Social Media Audit! Social Media Governance Plan: Part 3

By Janet Church on February 02, 2016

Social_Media_Audit___Brandle.pngIf 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
This post (Part 3) continues with the process of creating your Social Media Governance Plan and prepares you for your corporate social media audit.  

Continue Reading
5 min read

Understanding Key Corporate Risks to Better Manage Social Media Risk

By Janet Church on January 05, 2016


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, DeloitteProtiviti (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.
Your corporate web presence (web and social media sites) are inroads to trigger all of these major risk concerns! 

Continue Reading

Featured