Risk Management: Social Media

To repurpose a famous quote from A Tale of Two Cities: Social media has brought both the best and the worst of times for your company.

The best? Social media can improve your marketing efforts while allowing you to communicate almost instantly with your prospects, clients, employees, and job candidates.

The worst? Social media also can leave your company vulnerable to employees who disseminate proprietary information, confidences and even inappropriate material to outsiders.

Social media, at its worst, also can damage your company’s reputation (in just 24 hours – or even more quickly!); lead to identity theft; and even legal, compliance, and regulatory problems.

There are two main areas where social media can harm your company:

  1. The public may talk about your company on the various social media sites negatively.
  2. Your employees can disseminate information they shouldn’t.

To manage the negative aspects social media can bring to you company, we suggest the following:

  • Put together a team from all departments at your firm with the purpose of working together to mitigate risks.
  • Have each department document its need for social media access/use. Review these assessments to ensure that they align with your social media objectives.
  • Assess the risks your company faces. What are the potential risks and how likely are they to come to fruition? Then you’ll need to consider putting controls into place to mitigate the risks.
  • Expand your current social media policy (or create one) and put your safeguards in place. A good policy will aim to address which employees (if any) may access social media while at work, as well as how you’ll use social media when recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and terminating employees.
  • Make sure that all of your employees are instructed and trained (if necessary) on your company’s social media policy. Tell them clearly what you deem to be unacceptable and acceptable uses of social media.
  • You must monitor your social media presence. You need to know what people are saying about you almost as soon as they say it. This provides you with a great customer service opportunity (you can address a customer’s concerns immediately) and it also will let you know when employees might be giving information they shouldn’t. There are many social customer relationship management (CRM) tools available today that will help you monitor what people are saying about your company online.

When your Riverside or San Bernardino county company needs workers for temporary or direct-hire opportunities, look to the recruiters at Arrow Staffing to help you find them. Contact us today.

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