General
Which Social Media Sites Scare You?
Sep 06 2012
What social media sites scare you? Which ones represent risks to your organization?
In the spring, Deloitte and Forbes Insights asked US executives about the biggest risks to their organizations in the next 3 years, and Social Media was one of the top 5 sources of risk. Over a quarter of the executives from businesses engaged in consumer and industrial products, life sciences, health care, technology, media and telecommunications said that social media was a risk.
So, we know that organizations are scarred of social media, but which sites are the scariest?
In its August 2012 study “Guarding the Gates: The Imperative for Social Media Risk Management,” Altimeter Group found that companies considered the top three social networks the riskiest – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
This probably isn’t surprising since more companies are on those sites, so it isn’t surprising that there is increased risk in the more popular sites.
As we look more at WHY these sites are risky the picture becomes more clear. On Facebook a negative comment about a brand can be seen not only by the friends of the poster, but anyone who visits the page. Businesses have much less control on Facebook, and deleting posts that are negative can blow up and create an even bigger problem. The fact that any post can be seen by all of the brand fans, and the posts can’t be moderated in advance is inherently risky for businesses that are used to controlling their messages.
Twitter is risky because messages spread SO QUICKLY. A negative experience about a business on Twitter can spread like wildfire. Also, all of the mentions about brands are public, which means that everyone is exposed to tweets, even if a business isn’t active on Twitter yet.
While businesses see this as risky, what is interesting is that these risks, the risk that people will say bad things about your business, has always been there. It is now just amplified and public.
There are a number of things that businesses can do to overcome these risks:
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I find it funny that in the survey review sites like Yelp and Amazon were ranked so low. Yelp scares me more than any other site, because of the way they filter reviews based on how “elite” the reviewer may or may not be. They don’t take into account the one time positive or negative reviewer. I think a really bad review on one of those sites can be way more damaging than a negative post on Facebook or Twitter… those typically get lost in the stream of updates.