Monetary Considerations
Medium to large-sized businesses usually have a budget dedicated to both marketing and information security practices. Although this may not necessarily be the case for the small company, most likely some money is dedicated, however unstructured, to these two areas. Here you need to access the budget for securing social media and determine if it comes from the IT or Marketing budget?
Assessing the Current Environment
Putting all of the tools, policies, and procedures in place to attain your security goals requires a budget. Where does the money for the security budget come from? Social media budgets are being developed, but not many companies have yet set aside a budget specific to social media security. Knowing what’s needed is difficult as social media changes so frequently, so budgets have to be focused on building processes and operations irrespective of the actual social media platform being used. It shouldn’t matter if your company is using Google Buzz or Facebook, a budget needs to be in place for the tools and processes needed to secure the medium being used, which is a cloud service.
Information Gathering
Assessing current security controls is a difficult process. The value of a control compared to the value of a deliverable is extremely difficult to determine in social media. There are no accepted formulas for calculating the value of social media and metrics for properly measuring results. Security is such a new part of social media you have to determine what value you want to place on security. How do you measure the cost and value of a control?
To measure your social media security spending, you have to identify what tools are necessary, how many resources are required, and what part of your IT Security budget or Marketing budget will be required to meet those security goals. If no budget is dedicated to social media, who is to blame when you do not have the controls for social media security in place and a problem occurs? A security budget also has to include the cost of data loss through social media channels.
Social media monetary spending can be tracked and categorized to more easily organize your budget in regards to security requirements. This cost model is a good place to start if you do not already have a dedicated model for creating social media security budgets. Table 2-8 shows the breakdown of the Monetary spending portion of the H.U.M.O.R. Matrix.
Table 2-8 Monetary Spending Requirements
Monetary spending has to work in conjunction with how employees conduct business. The more you positively reinforce valuable social media activity by employees, the more likely they are to
Report on inappropriate social media activity from within the company environment.
Actively champion the brand through social media (whether this is in their job description or not).
In other words, positive reinforcement helps you train your employees to do a big chunk of the monitoring for you, which lowers resource budgets over time, regardless of technology.
Measuring the Current State: H.U.M.O.R. Matrix
Table 2-9 shows how you would track your monetary spending. Here is how our test company JAG Electronics rated. JAG’s key problem is that the company does not have a budget dedicated to social media security. Nothing has been set aside from the IT security budget. No tools or services have been purchased to monitor the brand, report on threats to the company, or secure employee usage of social media.
