How Social Media Can Ruin Your Company or Reputation

If you’ve read a newspaper, watched the news or perused the Internet since Memorial Day weekend, chances are pretty good that you’ve come across the name Rep. Anthony Weiner. For those of you unfamiliar with him, let me provide a brief introduction. Weiner, who is the U.S. Representative for New York’s 9th congressional district, allegedly had his Twitter account hacked and someone posted a photo of Weiner’s private member on his account.

Weiner may be known for bringing millions of dollars home to New York City, including funds to remove graffiti, and whether or not he posted the photo himself or someone hacked his account, he has some graffiti of his own to clean up now.

In March 2011, a New Media Strategies employee accidentally published a post from Chrysler’s Twitter account (@ChryslerAutos) when they thought they were posting from their personal account. The tweet read:

“I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the #motorcity and yet no one here knows how to f**king drive.”

Needless to say, the employee was terminated. If your company has an outside firm handling its social media, ensure that there is a policy in place. If your organization manages the accounts internally, it’s still very important to establish guidelines that are clearly communicated to all employees.

Accidents can happen from time to time, and their impact on social media is no joke. Posts on Facebook and Twitter can spread like wildfire and while that might be the goal, when mishaps occur, they have the potential to cause major damage to reputations.

Since all of this Twitter drama went down with Weiner, it’s been determined that the photo posted was not sent from his BlackBerry phone from which he typically takes and posts Twitter photos.  

To help safeguard your social media accounts, take all necessary measures to protect yourself or your company from getting hacked. Eric Ligman recently posted a blog that provides tips on ways to protect Facebook and Twitter accounts, and he advises people to be especially careful when they’re using a public network. For all you smartphone users, there’s an Android application called FaceNiff that allows individuals to take over other people’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts by joining a network and running the same application. This is scary stuff and if I didn’t have your attention before, I’m sure I do now.

Due to the prevalence of political scandals, it initially seemed hard to believe that Weiner’s account was hacked, but I can certainly see how he could have fallen victim to wrongdoing. Both Facebook and Twitter have information on protecting your social media profiles that I would highly recommend every account holder read. 

It’s not uncommon for PR and marketing professionals to manage numerous social media accounts for clients.  If you do, always be sure to double-check any Facebook or Twitter postings before hitting send and make sure the post is being sent from the appropriate account. Even if you have a personal account, always use good judgment and think twice before publishing information on the Internet. Once posted, good or bad, it’s out there and there’s no going back.