No one wants to have a social media crisis on their hands. Does your organization have a policy or plan in place to manage your social media sites and activities, and mitigate unwanted risk? Through taking the proper steps to manage social media; training, a strict policy or changes of the internal process, many risks can be mitigated as they are identified during the initial planning stages. Likewise, monitoring can catch others with early detection lessening their impact. However, some risks are just too high, and should be avoided completely.
The list below identifies some of the risks we’ve encountered over the years.
External
- Legislative Risks (CASL, Accessibility)
- Identity Theft and Brand Hijacking
- Auto-generated Profiles
- Mistaken Identity
- Disengaging key audiences
- Social Media consolidation
- Poor (or no) community management
- Ghost Town
- Embarrassing posts
- Social Engineering
- Competitive Trouble-making
- Crisis management
- Keyword matching
- Profile counter-messaging (using PPC ads)
- Stakeholder expectation mismatch
- Comment spam
- Listening without hearing
- Contest fraud
Internal
- No Policy or Guidelines
- No training
- No monitoring or measurement
- Employee productivity
- Risky employee use
- Improper use of Social Media for candidate sourcing or reference checks
- Bad hires
- Departmental Social Media “expert” or intern becomes a lone cowboy
- No integrated Contact Center capability (Click to Chat, Twitter, etc.)
- Unempowered Contact Center or Social Media group staff
- Non Social Media-savvy people as official spokespersons
- Underestimating the influence (and speed) of Social Media
- Senior leadership misuses it (or doesn’t use it at all)
- Website/Blog attacks
- Ownership of Followers, especially when an employee leaves
- Not using it to engage stakeholders…
Do you recognize many of these risks? Do you think there are more that could be added to the list?
This week: Identify the top 2-3 risks associated to social media in your organization, and then, take steps to mitigate them.
