Wrap Up

The new social media tools that are being released almost daily create a unique challenge for companies trying to reduce risk. Employees, customers, and competitors have the capability to damage your company. A framework such as the H.U.M.O.R. Matrix is necessary to assess threats, implement controls, and provide continuous monitoring and reporting.

Some challenges remain in setting up a secure environment for social media. Security is a movable target and any implementation of social media security is a temporary remedy at best. Coordinated collective attacks can seriously damage brand assets and websites, and a key to security is to guard against these. Equally important is maintaining continued vigilance around mentions of your brand. The principal competency in reputation management is the ability to respond to, report on, and remediate situations affecting your brand’s reputation. Effectively managing the brand’s reputation involves a series of skills that take time to implement, involve technical tools and systems, require human resources to evaluate, and rely on business processes and effective digital literacy training. Successful reputation management depends on the ability to remedy situations by opening up lines of communication with the community and by being able to effect change within an organization to address the community’s concerns.