Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn: the risks with online social networking

Once considered a distraction, online social networking has changed the way businesses communicate and interact with customers and staff (and vice versa).

Social networking is a category of websites and services built around user-generated content and community networking. Popular examples include Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Businesses attempting to leverage social networking face many challenges, including:

• Keeping tabs on the various initiatives and communities across different social networking platforms.
• Engaging greater numbers of individuals (e.g. customers, partners and employee communities) for recruiting, product development, sales, and marketing can increase the workload involved in these areas.

Interestingly, the biggest security risks around enterprise social networking are generally not related to technology. They involve identity and privacy. There is a wealth of personal information about individuals available on social networking sites and people are, for the most part, very forthcoming with personal data and corporate information, posing a risk to company secrets.

Along with careful planning and execution, any business intending to use online social networking should consider:

• Assigning a specialist resource to both develop the strategy and monitor its success
• Starting small and testing your ideas before making a substantial investment on any particular initiative
• Ensuring your business has a clear online code of compliance for employees

Social networking technologies enable unprecedented levels of openness and transparency that can be transformational for business, however they bring new risks that businesses must address. The DCS team have a dedicated team focusing on online and new media as a specific channel to market for business. Online social networking will continue to evolve - will your brand-building activities adapt to harness this new communication tool and recognise it as a specific channel to market or treat it as a marketing activity?

 

DCS Consulting is your business growth specialist. For more information in relation to our quality business analysis, please contact:     

Level 5, 530 Collins Street,
Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia
growth@dcstrategy.com
+61 (0)3 8102 9200