Does Your Company Need a Social Media Risk Management Strategy?
Tuesday, March 20, 2007 at 12:14PM
In David Lynch’s movie DUNE, wise old Thufir Hawat says to young Paul Atreides:
You’ll make a formidable duke … but remember … the first step in avoiding a trap is knowing one exists.
Paul responds:
But if it’s a trap why are we going?
In the movie Thufir changes the subject to Paul’s fighting lesson with the Weirding Module. That is a good thing since, as we will see, a trap DOES exist on Arrakis, and all Paul’s preparations will be needed to survive.
While readers of this blog will know that I’m a big supporter of social media, social networking, web 2.0, and enterprise 2.0, it would be naive to think that these tools cannot be mismanaged or misused. In extreme circumstances their use might be considered a “trap,” especially if preparations are not in place to address problems when they arise.
Just as a local power utility must regularly rehearse how it would respond to a massive natural disaster that results in widespread power outages, so too a modern corporation must plan for a response to an informational disaster in which, for example, an unintended leakage of personal or medical information resulted in legal liability or public ridicule.
In the coming weeks I shall write a series of posts on this topic of “social media risk management,” beginning with an examination of the potential risks arising from social media within an organization. Please feel free to comment here and on my subsequent posts. If you have comments or suggestions about what you would like to see in the series, please let me know.
Also, to subscribe to these posts, either use my main feed (atom or rss) or a special “social media risk management” feed (atom or rss).
Reader Comments (6)
From the perspective of the security organization:
The forward looking security officers (CSOs) are very interested in their organization's security reputation. Why? Management only notices problems with *business impact* resulting in reactionary behavior of the CSO. CSOs look good when they are responsive to the incidents noticed by management.
One of the most effective methods is to collaborate with your customers/partners and most importantly, with management on the education and response to risk factors. This includes educating the CSO on business impacts of social media.
This process begins with the CSO understanding the risks and security information, which is largely unsolved for social media.
Looking forward to more posts on this subject.
Lou Manousos
While I find any reference to the movie version of Dune slightly offensive (What a horribly adapted movie!), I think you've got the right few lines. The one thing all businesses should be doing right now is acknowledging that the whole social media experience is happening and decide on their relation to it.
It's perfectly valid for business to state they don't want to be involved in the conversation and take steps to back that up. It's not okay for a business to ignore social media and hope it will return the favor.
StillSecure has taken the bull by the horns in this arena. Our CTO blogs, our CSO blogs and several other crew members blog. I blog, I podcast, I write and now I'm video blogging. My title is Product Evanglist and my job is to be part of any conversation involving our product, Cobia (http://cobia.stillsecure.com)
As you said, knowing the trap exists if half of staying out of it. Or making it through the trap.
Martin
Looking forward to reading more form you. Thanks.
One problem does arise from failure to understand that social media aren't just another channel for one way communication with a target audience. Effective use of social media (and social networking) requires two way engagement. For people raised on traditional advertising and PR this takes some adjustment.
Thanks for the comment!! - Dennis