How to Protect Your Brand from Rogue Social Media Accounts. Social media is quickly becoming one of the largest corporate risk sources for fines, lawsuits and lasting reputation damage. Customer Community Accounts Far less nefarious – but nevertheless, still a risk – are customer community accounts, which are often created by brand ambassadors or enthusiasts who admire a company. While the intention here is noble, the expression can be problematic because customers aren’t obliged to comply with brand, messaging and style guidelines. Employee-Created Unauthorized Accounts Though these accounts are often set up without malintent, employee-created unauthorized accounts can also pose a huge risk to your brand. Solving the Problem of Rogue Social Media Accounts Before tackling the problem of rogue social media accounts, businesses need to conduct a comprehensive and complete discovery to identify what and where unauthorized accounts exist. Next, businesses need to constantly monitor and report on their social media presence – and that’s where the Brandle Presence Manager enters the picture. Learn More To learn more about how the Brandle Presence Manager can help you discover and monitor rogue social media accounts, schedule your guided demo now. Then you can add these points-of-presence (POPs) to your Inventory in order to continue monitoring and managing them. Interested in taming your brand presence through better social media account management?
The issue of rogue social media accounts has been in the mainstream news lately, with revelations about false Twitter accounts for various government agencies such as the EPA, NPS and NASA.
However, businesses that consider themselves safely outside of the rogue social media fray because they haven’t yet been targeted – or they feel that they’re too small to capture the attention of adversaries — need to think again. Social media is quickly becoming one of the largest corporate risk sources for fines, lawsuits and lasting reputation damage.
Below, we highlight the most common – and indeed, costliest – ways that more businesses each year discover the unpleasant truth about rogue social media accounts:
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Counterfeit Accounts
Counterfeit accounts are surprisingly widespread, literally take minutes to set-up, and often look virtually identical to corporate pages (complete with logos, corporate colors, etc.). The purpose is to divert traffic and sell counterfeit goods, or profit in some other way from the illegal appropriation of intellectual property (e.g. falsely endorsing a business so that it can generate leads and sales, etc.)
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Phishing Accounts
Phishing accounts are even more worrisome. Like counterfeit accounts, they look identical to corporate pages. The intent is to get customers, suppliers and even employees to enter information or click links that lead to hacked devices and breached networks. Often, these cyber criminal campaigns can last for years without being detected.
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Customer Community Accounts
Far less nefarious – but nevertheless, still a risk – are customer community accounts, which are often created by brand ambassadors or enthusiasts who admire a company. While the intention here is noble, the expression can be problematic because customers aren’t obliged to comply with brand, messaging and style guidelines. As such, they can (and often do) unintentionally spread misinformation. Sometimes,…
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