Social Networking and security. . .or lack of when promoting your brand.

The world of social networking is a new and evolving one bringing about heated discussions over previously overlooked topics such as privacy and security. As long as there is an internet to find it on it's likely that everything you ever post will stick around and be findable by someone. Don't believe me? Just ask my friend who can't use his brand name anymore after googling it and finding a questionable AIM conversation we had that I posted to a website over ten years ago. This illustrates the first concern social networking and the internet as a whole pose to the security of your brand name: permanence. If you, and employee, or anyone else posts something that casts your brand in a bad light that will be out there and can potentially hurt your brand image. This can be inadvertent or possibly even targeted since your brand isn't the only one out there for whatever market you are in.

There are a vast number of tools out there to help you manage your brand and track how it is received, but those tools are also available to your competition and could potentially be used against you. Let's suppose your brand is Coca-Cola and the evil Pepsi is your competitor. While you use tools to track what people are saying about your wonderful product on social media sites, Pepsi can do the exact same thing for not only their brand, but also for yours. This could allow them to find out what your customers like, dislike, and want out of your brand, which in turn can allow Pepsi to target their advertising or even product to what your customer base wants and steal your customers. Although this is a more indirect threat to your brand security, it still can hurt sales and thus weaken your brand.

Suppose now that the evil brand Pepsi wants to be a little bit more proactive in attacking your brand. Knowing that you likely follow social networking to find out how best to improve your brand, they could start a campaign to bloat your data with false information. It's not hard to sign up for a social networking account and start posting whatever you want about a product or service, so multiply this by a few thousand and you're getting false feedback on how best to improve your brand. Social networking also doesn't do a particularly good job of verifying your are who you say your are, so they could even pose as employees of your fine company and start posting messages that will hurt your brand's image. While it would technically be possible to prove in the long run that the account was not actually of an employee, the damage to your brand at that point would already be done.

The internet has been likened to the Wild West and while this is a large part of the appeal it has, it also means that there are many privacy and security concerns you must be aware of when making a presence on it, both personally and professionally. Your brand needs a presence on the internet and especially within social networking, but protecting and managing it within that context is critical. If you still don't think that the internet can potentially pose a huge threat to your business, go ahead and read this: http://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/T048-C000-S002-the-truth-behind-penny-stock-spam.html.