Risk Management and Social Media are becoming synonymous. Web content upends the traditional form of top-down information dispersal.
Maureen O’Neil writes in a February 9, 2009 post on Gartner.com that when information freely flows in and out of an organization it provides a new way to extend brand identity and at the same time ….
“….ushers in novel risks that can’t always be mitigated through traditional risk management strategies. Facebook, MySpace LinkedIn and Twitter, along with countless blogs and chats are Web environments where anonymously supplied information about a company’s products and services are shared and compared, in some cases inaccurately.”
Law firms are in the same boat. Social media exposes firms to significant risks including serious damage to their reputation or the outcomes of the cases they may be working on or even impact their clients’ interests if not kept in check.
Here are my CMO checklist items 13-18.
13. Dedicate at least one employee to monitor your online reputation. Create a system to track data and do something with it. (Or, hire an outside reputation management service to monitor your firm’s digital footprint.)
14. Set up Google Alerts for every configuration of your firm’s name, all attorneys and all staff. (This may seem like a huge undertaking yet, it is strongly recommended.)
15. Set up Google Alerts for key clients or key matters the firm is handling.
16. Register all iterations of your domain with various extensions such as .net and .mobi (to host mobile version for optimized viewing on smart phones). Good idea to include a hyphen version. E.g. jayne-navarre.com.
17. Register Twitter accounts for the firm and key attorneys even if they are not currently using them. Squatter rule on Twitter does not seem to be established yet. There are instances of identity fraud.
18. Set up RSS search feeds on Twitter for your firm name, key attorney names and key clients. Additional search feeds for any sensitive topics the firm may be handling would be a smart move.
Part II- final six of the top 25 items every CMO should include in their social computing tool box.
