Organizations continue to leverage social media channels to engage and interact with customers on a more personal level. Social media remains a great opportunity for businesses to connect with customers, job candidates and other stakeholders. However, before fully involving your business in social media, it’s important to understand the associated risks.
Negative content, such as bad customer reviews or unfavorable comments, may appear on your company’s social media sites. While social media allows a company to directly interact with customers—which can be very beneficial—expect that customers can and will use your site to air grievances. It’s also important to be aware that incidents—especially negative incidents—travel globally in a matter of hours on social media, having the potential to lead to disaster.
Consider the following tips to mitigate social media risks:
- Create, implement and enforce a social media policy. This policy sets the rules for how your employees should use social media on the company’s behalf. It is important that you train employees on your policy and security threats, and enforce it once it’s been implemented.
- Assign a community manager. This could be one employee or a team who are trained on social media and are responsible for all of the company’s social media accounts.
- Devise a response plan. This is your company’s monitoring and response strategy in the case that a reputational crisis occurs through social media channels and third-party websites. Along with negative incidents, the plan should address responding to positive and neutral content.
- Involve your legal department at the beginning of social media planning. As social media is incorporated into your marketing strategy, there are several legal consequences to consider. A legal expert can advise on implications such as false advertising, infringement, fair use and copyright.
The use of social media among businesses is increasing exponentially; however, there still remains uncharted territory in terms of which laws and business practices are evolving to meet the challenges that arise. To stay on top of modern-day risks, contact MountainOne Insurance to learn more about our risk management resources and insurance solutions.
By Zywave, Inc.