Social media risks of a poor or non-existent social media policy.

Good morning Bloggers!

Today I am Blogging about the Social media risks which can happen as a result of having a poor or no social media policy at all.

A quick recap on what a social media policy is, courtesy of Dundas Lawyers

"A Social Media Policy (SMP) is a document that supplements a contract of employment to be legally enforceable by an organisation on its employees. The aim of an SMP is to clearly communicate what is acceptable conduct on Social Networking Sites by an organisations employees and contractors and what conduct is unacceptable and would make an employee liable to dismissal.
An SMP is distinct from an organisations Social Media Strategy (SMS) which is a high level document that communicates how an organisation plans to participate in social media."

Various different organisations and company structures are open to different types of social media risks, some house highly confidential personal information which could be leaked internally to the external environment, others could be open to defamation in the case of on-line retailers or sectors where intangible assets are the most valuable - so clearly a highly resilient and bulletproof SMP is essential to ensure that social media is correctly handled in the organisation to ensure a positive outcome.

For our analysis i have chosen Westpac Banking Corporation, more common just know by the big red "W" or "Westpac". This group is a banking organisation founded 1982, it currently participates in social media by having a Facebook, Twitter and a Linkedin page.

As a banking corporation employees would house highly confidential information on customers, such as tax file numbers, account numbers, financial details and personally identifiable information, which having a loose unenforced SMP could result in information being divulged internally to externally, like the company tweeting "we don't like this person, here is his account number, pin and tax file number" extreme example, but similar things have happened. Here are some analysed risks for Westpac which i have identified that they could be open to for participating in social media

• Defamation
• People could go to the page and make abrasive comments tarnishing the brand, weather the comment is true or false
• Poor policies in place to deal with complaints handled via social media could tarnish the brand, it would show they are not active in the social world
• Loss of Confidential Information
• A rouge employee or intern could accidentally or purposely release company information
• Including but not limited to: Customer information, business strategies, employee information, details on the recent lay-off of 50 people which was meant to be kept company-secret
• Rouge employees could release information which competitors could use for their own gain
• Reputation Risk
• Any one of these breaches which occurs in social media and is visible to the public could have a devastating effect on the companies intangible assets, take the Dominoes Pizza "Dirty Incident" for example, in this case the wake was huge, as was it a massive dent to the companies image for quality and trust
• If the social media application is not properly moderated by an accompanying social media policy, anyone who has the password to the application in the organisation would have control of it, so there is no way of getting back control of the application if the employee resigns or is terminated, so "smear" campaigns are possible, the employee could go on a personal vendetta tarnishing the image with abrasive comments or revealing information on company executives, customers or employees

These are risks i have identified in Westpac participation in Social Media, with many thanks to Dundas Lawyers page on various types of social media risks

With the proper social media policy in place for westpac it would ensure comments and queires are handled in a timely manner when made on a social application (e.g. customer asking for support information on the official facebook page) and ensure that any defamatory comments are quickly removed or moderated from the page to ensure the companies intangibles are not tarnished in any way. A social media policy could also help for internal sitautions where the SMP is integrated in the terms of employeement the employee signs, so if the employee breaches the SMP he or she is liable for dissmissal or worse, legal proceedings against them. an SMP would also have a net effect of reducing all risks of reputation damage to the company logo by ensuring nothing slanderous, defamatory or illegal is posted on the social media application.

Social media policies are crucial to ensure social media is handled properly in an organisation, without a social media policy there is really no legal pavement in place for legal action to be taken on an internal individual e.g. dismissal or employee, policies in place to hand over rights to the social media application, etc.

Thanks for reading, please comment if you liked reading my Blog.