The Risks of Social Media

Social media is enjoying lots of buzz. Your salespeople want to use the power of social media to promote your products and services. Your employees are participating at home and want to do so at work. Everyone seems to agree that the buzz is justified. But there are risks involved, especially in terms of technology. So what are the risks of social media?

Storage risks

In order to determine whether your network can support such initiatives, start with an assessment of how you plan to use social media. Will you be using primarily text-based methods like blogging or Tweeting? Or will you be doing more multimedia-intensive communication through sites like YouTube or Flickr? 

This distinction is important. The storage and bandwidth requirements for text-based interaction are similar to what’s required for word processing and email. If your network is up to those tasks, then you shouldn’t have a problem. 

But if you’re planning to share multimedia content (pictures, video, music, audio), then you may need a lot of storage capacity and bandwidth. This is especially true if you’ll be creating or editing the files that you’ll be uploading, or if you’ll be storing and sharing files that you download. Remember, many internet circuits download faster than they upload, which can be a bottleneck if you’re trying to upload video clips or high-resolution pictures.

Security risks

It’s also important to consider the security risks of social media. If you’re downloading content, you’re bringing information from strangers into your network. Be sure that you have anti-virus and anti-malware protection on all of the computers that you’re using, and that you keep those software programs up to date. Even better, designate a separate computer that’s used exclusively for downloading and scanning files before they’re saved to your network.

Intellectual property risks

There are other security risks associated with uploading content, albeit intellectual property risks rather than technology risks. Uploading information introduces the risk of inadvertently disclosing confidential or proprietary information, or presenting information that may portray your company unfavorably. Surely, you already take care to scrutinize any outgoing product for publication, including possible legal opinion, before that information is released. 

Social media, in contrast, is an on-the-fly process. It’s created and released rapidly in an effort to be timely and immediate, often without a chance for appropriate review and editing. And because social media is intended to achieve rapid widespread dissemination of information, a mistake or inappropriate disclosure (contained, for example, in a Tweet) may be instantly and irretrievably displayed to all of your followers, including your competitors. Therefore, you should assure that you implement the same controls on social media dissemination that you have on other forms of information release.

Treat social media as a significant business decision and strategic investment. Be sure to plan for, and continually evaluate the ROI of, your social media activities. 

It’s likely that you’re already being influenced by other companies’ initiatives, and, if you haven’t already, you probably want to launch your own. If so, plan carefully. Evaluate the opportunities, consider the risks, ensure that you have enough storage and bandwidth, and start using social media to favorably influence others.