There has been much written recently about the marketing opportunities available to corporations who employ social media in their marketing mix. No doubt about it. There are many and great opportunities there. Especially so now given the fact that social media are relatively cost-efficient and the current state of the global economy.
But opportunities don’t come without costs. With every opportunities there is also a threat. And, unfortunately, even if a company does not actively use social media in its marketing mix, even if they don’t pursue those great opportunities, the threats are still there. Bummer.
I recently discovered a great white paper on the subject of threats from social media. This paper is published by ENISA, the European Network and Information Security Agency, an arm of the EU government. Click here to read this great study. Much of what ENISA discusses in this report is related to technical, infrastructure, threats. Yet, there are many threats that exist which are not of a technical or hacking type of nature. There are threats that are informational in nature. When you open the ENISA document, turn to page three in the Exec Summary and find Threat SN.1, Digital Dossier Aggregation.
Threat SN.1 is defined as “profiles on online SNSs (social networks) can be downloaded and stored by third parties, creating a digital dossier of personal data.” Now this type of threat definition implies some sort of hacking activity in order to download personal profile info appearing in various social networks. But let’s step past the technical for a moment and extend this concept, and just imagine that even if a determined competitor wouldn’t commit the act of hacking and downloading, much of the info that they would seek is publicly available just by review of a targeted competitor’s employees’ profiles. Sure, review would take longer than a hacking download of the profile info, but it’s a heck of a lot more legal.
What could a competitor do with this info? Well, let’s say the competitor seeks to evaluate some of your company’s strengths and weaknesses via a review of the experience and qualifications of your company’s personnel, and that they find a lot of your personnel on business/professional networking sites. (You know the ones I’m thinking of.) Reviewing that info isn’t difficult. Well, to counter this theory you might say, “No, Rich. Access to those profiles is limited to people within the targeted individual’s network.” Very true. But also true is that access isn’t difficult to obtain. How many people do you know who “friend” everyone in sight? How many more do you know who accept invitations to “join my network” when they don’t know the person making the request?
See what I mean?
Food for thought.
In my next post on this subject, I’ll be looking at some other social media threats that ENISA has pointed out, and adding in some of my own discovery.
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