Organizational Analysis: Your Industry Online, the Good and the Bad

Social media permeates the Internet and affects most departments within the organization. Social media strategies are often implemented piecemeal and independently by each department within an organization, which becomes complicated when each department has its own priorities and agenda. Depending on your role within the company, you will be faced with answering these questions related to the impact and use of social media by your current organization and by prospective employees:

IT Security If you are in charge of security, you will be asked: What tools are available to secure usage? How can you monitor, block, and report on activity? What are other companies in your industry doing for their social media practices? How many resources have they dedicated to social media and what risk strategies have they implemented?

Human Resources If you are in charge of Human Resources, you will be asked: How will social media platforms impact the organization? What can or can’t employees say or do on social platforms? What types of policies need to be in place? What type of training should be provided? How does this affect the decision-making process for hiring new employees? What are the legal ramifications?

Marketing If you are the Marketing manager, you will be asked: How are competitors leveraging these platforms? What are the best practices for realizing the full potential of social media, even while protecting the company from anticipated challenges and unanticipated problems? How can we best leverage social media for internal collaboration within the enterprise?

Analyzing Your Social Media Initiatives

Determining which platforms are relevant to your objectives, what metrics to use, and how to put systems in place to monitor, measure, and report on various social media activities can be challenging. For example, let’s say you are the Marketing Director of a Fortune 100 company tasked with developing your company’s marketing efforts through social media. The factors you use to determine success may vary widely from those used by the Sales department or Customer Support. Should you develop a social media presence through creating a Facebook page, focus on growing your Twitter followers, or both? Are you looking to generate direct sales through dedicated channels like @DellOutlet or @JetBlueDeals on Twitter? But your responsibility doesn’t end here. In the new world of social media security, you then have to interface with the IT department to understand how the technologies you select for your campaign might introduce a weakness into the environment or subject the company to attack. Each approach has its pros and cons, and each industry has its share of case studies highlighting great successes and epic failures.

Analyzing Your Existing Internal Processes

One of the first questions to ask is Who is responsible for the creation and dissemination of the corporation’s social media policy? And the social media security policy? No one department can create these documents. Your existing IT security policy was most likely a collaboration among IT, Human Resources, and Legal. The analysis requires the following steps:

Inventory your IT assets and associate them with marketing activities and social media tools.

Facilitate brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders together in one room for each new project.

Set goals for your social media campaigns and allocate the right IT resources to execute those goals.

Identify the risk and failure potentials for each project.

A key new collaborator is the end-user employee. IT typically does not work with employees when creating policies. This has to change when developing social media policies and security controls that actually work over social media technologies that are not actually owned by the IT department. Employees who are more digitally literate will want to respond and become involved in the co-creation process around social media policy. Because of the participatory nature of the process, employees will feel more engaged, stimulated, and a sense of ownership of the result, thus motivating them to follow and enforce the rules they helped create. IT cannot wholly own this process.

The tone, frequency, timeliness, and authenticity of your process and response to the end user can make the difference in successfully addressing and extinguishing potential social media wildfires. Conversely, an ineffective process can quickly destroy any hard-earned gains that your organization may have built over time.

Securing Customer Data

As BP illustrated, social media technologies make it simple for virtually anyone with access to a connected computer or device to publish unedited text and media. Clearly, corporate interests are at stake, as a brand image that took decades to build can be greatly tarnished or destroyed online in a few hours through word of mouth activity that spreads virally online. The list of case studies grows longer each year, and notable examples include the likes of Dell, Kryptonite, Comcast, United Airlines, Target, Nestle, Motrin, Amazon, BP, Domino’s Pizza, Google, and many others. To start off most chapters in the book, we use a case study to show the relevance of that chapter using a real-world example.

In this new era of engagement, companies must set the ground rules for handling customer data in the social world. The release of private medical files by a doctor’s office or the legal ramifications of financial advice from a wealth manager are but two examples of the critical need for companies to establish a social media policy framework.

Securing Channels of Communication

This book serves as a practical guideline for corporations wishing to safeguard their interests, assets, and rights while simultaneously increasing their level of engagement with internal and external communities through the secure use of social media tools and platforms.

By defining boundaries around corporate interests, safe and productive conversations may flourish, even when these may reflect negative customer experiences. The guidelines we discuss will cover all the areas of risk associated with open communications through social media tools and platforms. The chapters ahead contain implementable information, case studies, quick tips, and best practice advice.

Individuals involved in social media should secure their channels of communication and pick the right medium for the company to engage with clients and the general public. In this book, we give examples of what can be said in a public forum and what should be encrypted via offline communications. Understanding the difference between these plays a part in the multilevel defense of a company’s online reputation while, at the same time, allowing for real end-user engagement.

To remain competitive, companies must constantly monitor the sentiment of online mentions in order to evaluate the strength of their brand equity and identify potential threats. Online reputation management is a key component in your social media strategy’s success. The whole world is talking, and it’s up to you to monitor (and at times respond to) what people are saying about you and your organization.

Identifying the Current Gaps in How Your Company Utilizes Social Media Securely

Many corporations involved in the social media space have been ineffective in dealing with issues of security or consumer privacy. In many cases, the people involved are woefully unaware of the rapidly changing legal landscape or the frequently modified privacy policies of many social networks. The responsibility for securing social media is completely undefined in most companies today. Social media is constantly evolving, and one of the goals of this book is to define the strategies, tactics, and best steps needed to navigate the social media sphere securely. But companies are not solely to blame. Facebook, the current de facto leader in the American and worldwide social media space (over 700 million users at the writing of this book), has been historically notorious for continuing to test the limits of the end-user’s need for privacy and for poorly communicating changes in its privacy policy. If the social networks themselves expect users to protect themselves through ongoing vigilance, then how should companies provide protection for their customers, their employees, and their assets?

Does your corporate responsibility extend to protecting your employees at home when they use social media? If employees are using social networks to communicate about your organization on their own time (whether sanctioned or not), how can you protect your brand? If it’s your responsibility to protect the laptop the employee takes home with firewalls and antivirus and to protect the applications the employee uses on that laptop, by extension do you have a responsibility to protect the social media messages posted by that employee as well?

Clearly, IT’s operating guidelines need to include a new section for social media operations or a completely new policy has to be created. These new guidelines should address existing gaps in your organization’s secure use of social media by responding to questions such as these:

Who is responsible for social media technologies and policies?

What activities are being conducted using social media technologies?

What is the impact of those activities?

When do social media activities occur and are appropriate notification, tracking, and monitoring systems in place?

How is each social media project managed and reported, and how are problems escalated?