Australian businesses should safeguard themselves and have a plan for social media just as they had for disaster recovery or business continuity, experts have warned.
Speaking at a recent industry event in Sydney, Intel's Philip Cronin said there was a need to have some risk mitigation when using social media.
"There is a telling statistic that up to 60 per cent of Australian companies do not have a meaningful social media policy or process, which they can implement and take advantage of," said Mr Cronin, who is director of regional sales and business development, Asia-Pacific, at Intel.
"If they have got the right rigour around ensuring that there are policies and procedures, then they have got a very good solid basis for moving more energy and time into that environment from a company perspective and trying to advantage from that."
Mr Cronin said CEOs should embrace the changes brought by social media and explore what it meant to their organisation.
"We can use it in many ways as either a communication piece between the different groups or a means to go to market to proliferate our services or other features of the organisation," said Mr Cronin, who is also chair of the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA).
The event, hosted by law firm DLA Piper, discussed the use of social media within the enterprise and was attended by CEOs, CIOs and other senior executives.
DLA Piper intellectual property and technology partner Alec Christie said while there was a desire to capture customers with social media there was a lack of understanding of how it fitted into the traditional legal environment.
"The risks are leaving it to a group or an individual in a company without having a strategy, without having a policy and without having rules in place as to how it is being used," he said.
Mr Christie said a recent finding by the Advertising Standards Bureau held Fosters liable for anti-women and anti-gay comments on the Victoria Bitter Facebook page.
"Although it was other people's comments, it was their Facebook page, it was their advertising and, therefore, they were responsible for those people’s comments."
He said companies should apply the same rigour to social media campaigns as they did to traditional print and TV campaigns.
"There are a number of badly thought out social media strategies where people get unremittingly negative responses and get overwhelmed," he said. "It escalates and it multiples and they have got no plan for dealing with it."
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