Five Steps to Kick Off Your Social Governance Plan in 2017

This featured guest post was written by Christina Tolosa, Alliance Manager at Proofpoint.

The holiday season isn’t just a time for apple cider, snowball fights, and spending time with family - it’s also a great opportunity for brands to engage with their customers through social. But through all the of conversations, posts, and tweets around the holidays, how can companies and social marketers work with schedules so irregular? Should you rethink your governance plan for the New Year?

Before the New Year begins, LiftMetrix and Proofpoint have compiled a handy list of 5 steps to help make your 2017 governance plan more successful and protect your organization:

1. Collaborate With Your Social Team: We recommend that the security team reach out to the social media team and establish a collaborative relationship in which the teams work together put the right safeguards in place. Ensure them that your goal is to simultaneously help social be more successful by building a safer environment and protecting the business from unnecessary risk. Collaboration is critical because accurately measuring business risk, defining process guidelines, training, and even deploying protective controls will require buy-in from the social team.
2. Assess Your Social Footprint and Risks: A prerequisite to implementing social media security is to gain an understanding of your social media footprint and risks. In addition to creating an inventory of known corporate and employee accounts, you’ll likely discover accounts that have been created for regions or products that are unknown to centralized corporate social account owners. You’re also likely to find fraudulent accounts created to rip off your brand and customers
3. Educate Employees: Deliver security awareness training covering how to avoid social media attacks, including: limiting connections to known contacts (especially on LinkedIn), identifying scams, and avoiding dangerous links. To be most effective, social media security education should be ongoing with periodic assessment of knowledge and vulnerability levels within the company. Deliver this training to corporate social media account owners as well as employees who represent the brand through their personal accounts (e.g., social brand advocates).
4. Apply Best Practice Security Controls: Implementing a tool to provide automated content moderation is the ideal approach to relieve your social media team from burdensome, manual review of every post. Solutions such as Proofpoint SocialPatrol provides real-time content filtering that automatically removes malware, profanity, hate speech, and other dangerous content from your social media accounts. This approach delivers scalable content moderation that makes social media safer and more engaging for your brand and community.
5. Measure Your Compliance and Security Risks: One of the key challenges that brands face is measuring the cost of hours spent manually reviewing all content across all accounts, plus remediating any problem content. Using LiftMetrix’s social analytics tool with advanced ROI capabilities, and Proofpoint’s automated security and content moderation solutions, brands are able to measure their compliance and security risks in dollars and cents.

For more information on how LiftMetrix and Proofpoint work together, click here.