Companies need to manage social media exposures: Experts
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Social media can be a powerful tool for businesses and other organizations, but its use creates exposures that must be managed, according to two risk management executives.
“In today’s digital world, social media has become essential to the core of business operations,” Lianne Appelt, Whiteford, Maryland-based head of enterprise risk management for Salesforce.com Inc., said during a Tuesday session at Riskworld, the Risk & Insurance Management Society Inc.’s annual meeting in Atlanta.
As of last month, some 94% of companies, including 97% of the Fortune 500, were using social media, Ms. Appelt said. Consuming that content is the roughly 59% of the world’s population that uses social media, including 90% of people in the U.S who use social media “actively,” averaging 2 hours and 31 minutes a day.
Concerns still surround the medium, however, due to incidents of misinformation and privacy issues, Ms. Appelt said.
How a business manages its social media can create exposures, said Mary Jones, Sacramento, California-based principal risk program manager for Oracle Corp. Running the program organically, using an organization’s own personnel, may leave oversight less robust than if it’s managed by a third-party contracted vendor, which then opens access to the contactor and its employees, she said.
In managing social media activities, it can be useful for a company to have a common definition of what constitutes social media, Ms. Appelt said.
Carefully vetting content and its timing is also critical, according to Ms. Jones. “A poorly executed post or misinterpreted comment can be enough to spark an event,” she said.
