With all of the social media tools available to day like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, High5 etc…, how can we really feel secure in our postings?
Recently, Twitter was hacked and it was offline for a while. I often wonder if we are sharing all of this content out there are we making ourselves more vulnerable to hackers? And if so can we protect our content?
This could have some serious implications from a reputation management perspective. If a large corporation posted a message into social media and it was manipulated into something quite offensive. The negative implications can be huge.
Miss information can spark feeding frenzies, things like Web forums and newsgroups were the main social communication tool. People would go from Web forum to Web forum to spread news about people or products. Think about it, if the media surfs social media for the inside scoop for new stories, it could end up on the news. For example I was following Oprah when she first started Tweeting. She had mentioned pulling a story because she didn’t want to sensationalize the Columbine shootings. That was a story on my 6:00 local news that very same day.
I also noticed when the Swine Flue first was talked about all types of miss information was populated around. There was such a panic. Now imaging what if your big company who you worked for Twitter account was hacked and it said they were going to go out of business. The workplace would be buzzing with the miss information.
Here are some useful tips:
• Use a different password for your accounts.
• Don’t post all personal information online. Social media is about sharing but not if your passwords are based upon your pet’s names or hometown.
• Security experts advise people to use unique, complex passwords and include a mix of numbers and letters. Free password management programs like KeePass and 1Password can help people.
• Resetting your passwords periodically is a good thing to do as well.
• Write down your user name and passwords and store them in a private space.
• Populate your blog to a variety of web sites to point followers to in case of any breach in security.
• Create a action plan in case there ever is an issue with your account.
• Monitor your postings often to keep a eye out.
