Think of your move into social media (Facebook/Fan/Business Pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) like you would approach the task of helping your fifteen-year-old daughter prepare to drive on her own. You love her more than anything on earth and would do anything for her (just like you will go to great lengths grow your business), but that doesn’t mean you just hand her the keys. Trying to forbid or ignore the movement into social marketing is like telling your teen that they can’t get their license. It isn’t going to happen, so you might consider putting down the denial and controlling those pieces of change that are within your power. The task is to maximize the positives of her newly bestowed freedom while minimizing any negatives; the same is true in social media.

Here’s a simple plan to follow that will help keep you safe and productive:

1. Understand the Risks & Rewards. Just like you need to know the risks of a teen driving (peer pressure, alcohol, inexperience, inferior equipment), you need to fully understand the risks of operating this powerful piece of equipment we call social media or social networking. Privacy Concerns: Users who fail to customize their Facebook privacy, security and sharing settings are giving away massive amounts of information to other Facebook users, Facebook Vendors (e.g., Farmville), Facebook itself and potentially competitors, thieves and social engineers. Over Exposure: You can share too much on Facebook, including posts, photos and videos that you later regret uploading. If done improperly or without thought, this can lead to increased risk of identity theft, reputation hijacking, burglary or fraud. Reputation Damage: AFLAC fired comedian Gilbert Godfrey as their spokesperson for making a negative comment about the insurance giant on his wall. How you and your employees use social media directly influences your reputation.  Account Takeover: Imagine a pornography crime-ring taking over your fan page for a day. It’s usually not this extreme of a case, but accounts are constantly being compromised and used for nefarious and illegal purposes (sending SPAM, peddling pornography, covering crimes). Just because there are risks doesn’t mean you abandon the medium. It means that you prepare for them, just like training your daughter to drive defensively, break properly on ice and make smart choices about who gets in the car.
2. Define Your Destination. Many businesses that utilize social media don’t actually know why they are using it, other than it’s the thing to do. But using it effectively takes a huge time and knowledge investment, so make sure you define what you want to achieve before you invest. Are you there to make friends, to network, to increase visibility, reshape your reputation or improve customer service? Driving without a destination in mind might be fun, but it will ultimately get you nowhere.
3. Choose the Right Equipment. Once you have defined your objective, you will have a better idea of which social medium to use (Facebook, Fan Page, Twitter, etc.). If your objective is to get your daughter safely from one place to another, you will choose a very different car than if you are trying to enhance her image with friends by buying a sports car. Trying to be part of every last social network means that you will use none of them effectively. Choose one or two platforms and take the time to perform the final two steps.
4. Fasten Your Seat belt. An hour spent understanding and modifying the default privacy and security settings (which are very lax by default) on Facebook or another social site can save you and your organization tragic amounts of data loss and abuse. Our refusal as a society to take this simple, available step to protect our information is the equivalent of not fastening our seat belts while driving. Is it slightly inconvenient and a occasionally uncomfortable? Yes. Does it drastically increase your safety? Without question. With great power comes great responsibility, and we must start communicating that to others around us.
5. Educate Your Driver. This knowledge, from awareness to customization, is only effective if it is passed on to others. You might know how to drive safely, but that doesn’t mean your daughter has picked it up by osmosis. The same is true inside of your organization; it’s not good enough for you do drive safely, the other members of the team must do the same – and not just for their own good, but because it also helps you be safe. After all, just like your daughter will ride in another teen’s car (and you want them to be well trained), your contacts will be handling your data in a social context (think of the picture of you at a St. Patrick’s Day party they consider posting) and need to know how to treat it.

There is nothing gained by ignoring or denying this social movement. It won’t be stopped and you will be part of it, either directly or indirectly. In turn, your business will be affected by how the employees and executives approach and even leverage the energy of social media. If you’re not out there educating your drivers, they are off doing it on their own anyway, seat belt-less and clueless.

John Sileo trains organizations on information leadership, including social media control, identity theft prevention and reputation management. His satisfied clients include the Department of Defense, FDIC, Pfizer and Homeland Security. To bring John in to speak to your organization, contact his staff on 800.258.8076 or watch him entertain audiences with vital content at www.ThinkLikeASpy.com.

Related posts:

1. 7 Steps to Secure Profitable Business Data (Part I)
2. 7 Steps to Secure Profitable Business Data (Part II)
3. 7 Steps to Stem Facebook Privacy Bleeding

Facebook, and social networking sites in general, are in an awkward stage between infancy and adulthood – mature in some ways, helpless in others. On the darker side of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, scammers and identity thieves are drooling at the sight of this unchecked data playground. In contrast, most social networkers are addicted to all of the friendships they are creating and renewing.

There is no denying that Facebook and other social networking sites have a very luring appeal.  You can sit in the comfort of your own home and suddenly have a thriving social life.  You can look up old friends, make new ones, build business relationships and create a profile for yourself that highlights only your talents and adventures while conveniently leaving out all your flaws and troubles.  It is easy to see why Facebook has acquired over 200 million users worldwide in just over five years. Which is why Facebook safety is still so immature: Facebook’s interface and functionality has grown faster than security can keep up.

Unfortunately, most people dive head first into this world of social connectedness without thinking through the ramifications of all the personal information that is now traveling at warp speed through cyberspace.  It’s like being served a delicious new drink at a party, one that you can’t possibly resist because it is so fun and tempting and EVERYONE is having one.  The downside? Nobody is thinking about the information hangover that comes from over-indulgence: what you put on the Internet STAYS on the internet, forever. And sometimes it shows up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, in the hands of a prospective employer or your boss’s inbox. All of the personal information that is being posted on profiles — names, birth dates, kids’ names, photographs, pet’s names (and other password reminders), addresses, opinions on your company, your friends and your enemies — all of it serves as a one-stop shop for identity thieves.  It’s all right there in one neat little package and all a scammer has to do to access it is become your “friend”.

Follow these Five Facebook Safety Tips and save yourself the trouble…

5 Facebook Safety Tips

Facebook Safety Tip #1: If they’re not your friend, don’t pretend. Don’t accept friend requests unless you absolutely know who they are and that you would associate with them in person, just like real friends.

Facebook Safety Tip #2: Post only what you want made public. Be cautious about the personal information that you post on any social media site, as there is every chance in the world that it will spread beyond your original submission.  It may be fun to think that an old flame can contact you, but now scammers and thieves are clambering to access that personal information as well.

Facebook Safety Tip #3: Manage your privacy settings. Sixty percent of social network users are unaware of their default privacy settings. Facebook actually does a good job of explaining how to lock your privacy down (even if they don’t set up your account with good privacy settings by default). To make it easy for you, follow these steps:

1. Spend 10 minutes reading the Facebook Privacy Policy. This is an education in social networking privacy issues. Once you have read through a privacy policy, you will never view your private information in the same way. At the point the privacy policy is putting you to sleep, move on to Step 2.
2. Visit the Facebook Privacy Help Page. This explains how to minimize all of the possible personal information leakage that you just read about in the privacy policy. Once you understand this on one social networking site, it becomes second nature on most of the others. 
3. Now it is time to customize your Facebook Privacy Settings so that only information you want shared, IS shared. This simple step will reduce your risk of identity theft dramatically.

Facebook Safety Tip #4: Keep Google Out. Unless you want all of your personal information indexed by Google and other search engines, restrict your profile so that it is not visible to these data-mining experts.

Facebook Safety Tip #5: Don’t unthinkingly respond to Friends in Distress. If you receive a post requesting money to help a friend out, do the smart thing and call them in person. Friend in Distress schemes are when a thief takes over someone else’s account and then makes a plea for financial help to all of your friends (who think that the post is coming from you). As with all matters of identity, verify the source.

Following these 5 Facebook Safety tips are a great way to prevent an information-sharing hangover.

The best way to protect you and your children from Online threats is to educate yourself about Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other online social networking utilities.  We recently published the Facebook Safety Survival Guide (with Parents’ Guide to Online Safety) with that exact goal in mind. Social networking is immensely powerful and is here for the long run, but we must learn to harness and control it.

John Sileo is the award-winning author of Stolen Lives, Privacy Means Profit and the Facebook Safety Survival Guide. His professional speaking clients include the Department of Defense, the FTC, FDIC, Pfizer, Prudential and hundreds of other organizations that care about their information privacy. Contact him directly on 800.258.8076.

Related posts:

1. Social Networking Safety – Travel
2. Online Safety: The Truth About Social Media Identity Theft
3. Cyber-Bullying and Social Networking Identity Theft