Is Social Media Compromising Your Business

Article first published as Is Social Media Compromising Your Business on Technorati.

Facebook’s dodgy record on privacy got a fair bit of press the last couple of weeks…with the Mark Zuckerberg photo incident probably being a bit more embarrassing than the rest. Facebook has done its bit, with a pressure from the FTC among others, to address this issue.

The point is so far the privacy issue has centered on individual users. However, in the fracas, the issue of business security being compromised seems to have escaped attention.

Getting a social media profile has been the top priority for corporates. Over 84% of Fortune 500 companies are already on social media platforms. This is generally representative of the larger universe of business establishments, especially in the B2C space.

However, in the mad rush to socialize, I wonder if companies have thought through the consequences of their social media strategy. To understand the dangers of social media let us just take the simple and ubiquitous “Like” button that have popped up on almost all online promotional collaterals.

For this example, I have picked the website of my all-time favorite car the Swift. Like a majority of car markers the Swift site has links to Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Flickr. Now I see two problems with this. First a very basic marketing issue: Why have links that will take potential buyers away from your site. Browsing attention spans are notoriously fickle and a customer sent to another location might not come back. Your social media strategy should drive customers to your site, not away.

However, that is the lesser of the two evils. Now assume I, a potential Swift buyer, click on the Facebook link and like the Page. I am essentially broadcasting a fairly high degree of interest in the car and would be a potential target for every one of Swift’s rivals.

Facebook has made it incredibly easy for a rival to target these buyers. In fact an advertiser on the site can actually select the precise interests to target. So selecting, India in the country option and Maruti Suzuki Swift in Interest column will allow me to reach over 130,000 people who have Liked the Swift page.

Given the current ad rates on Facebook this allows rivals to target potential Swift buyers for a fraction of what Maruti Suzuki would have spent during the launch of the latest Swift model. Question is, have marketing teams assessed the potential loss of business a simple could create? Is that an acceptable risk for the overall payoffs that social media promises?

The bottom-line is social media is a critical marketing and communication tool. However, it seems that most companies have outsourced this activity to agencies, rather than try and understand the medium and make it an integral part of their communication strategy. This could compromise their business, rather than help them.