Most businesses these days have social media channels, from Twitter to facebook, google+, instagram and pinterest. It's import for all organisations, from small, medium and large to ensure their social media channels have appropriate security and best practice guidelines. Over the past few years there have been some very public and very damaging examples of businesses not applying best practice around their social media security.
Your website and Social media channels are essentially the Shop Window to your business, and if not managed pre, during and post a crisis can create a huge PR nightmare for any business. Disgruntled or uneducated employees can pop up anywhere and in an instant cause big problems! You also need to think about the number or limited number of people who have access to your channels, this includes external PR and Digital Agencies, consultants and your own internal digital marketing teams.
Here are three examples when social media best practice has 'Gone Bad'.
HMV Crisis - before firing your entire social media team, remove their access.
A large number of employees from HMV where fired on mass and several members of the social media team, feeling very angry and disgruntled decided to live tweet using the hashtag #hmvXFactorFiring. The tweets were live for approximately 25 minutes before being deleted.
The Red Cross - Employee accidentally sends personal tweet from Company Account
An employee accidently mixed up there social media scheduling tools and posted a personal tweet to the official Red Cross twitter feed. This tweet only stayed live for an hour, and the Red Cross recovered very well sending out another tweet in response.
MacDonalds or Burger King? Burger has their twitter account hacked by a MacDonalds Fan
Ok so this technically isn't an employee who made the edits, but someone was able to hack into Burger King's twitter account, this Twitter Banner was live for a couple of hours before the twitter account was suspended. The lesson here, ensure your passwords are strong and regularly changed.
