26
May
2010
The emergence of social media creates exciting opportunities for companies and organizations. It also creates privacy issues, for both the company and its consumers. Do you have a plan?
Beyond its hype and media frenzy, social media has truly been a revolution to the marketplace. It has literally changed the way our world does business. Smart companies are taking advantage of the new networks but many may forget to remember to create a social media privacy plan to protect their users.
Is it important? Look at Facebook. Recently, the company’s privacy settings tipped the scales at 6,000 words (longer than the U.S. Constitution), including more than 50 buttons and almost 200 different settings. So far, online users have shown a lackadaisical interest in protecting their privacy; wanting the option, but not making much of an effort beyond. However, Facebook’s approach pushed users beyond their traditional ambivalence, and the media coverage and social media outrage went from simmering to explosion. All this lead to Facebook, known for doing things their way and not particularly interested in listening to other’s opinions, to release a simpler, more user-friendly privacy policy this week.
All this proved, customers do have expectations for their privacy. And, thanks to Facebook, we’ve probably seen the end of customer leniency when dealing with companies and their privacy.
Even regulators are getting in on the game. Last June, the Article 29 Working Party, the EU body responsible for issuing privacy guidance, released Opinion 5/2009 on online social networking. A month later, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) issued the findings of an investigation of a complaint that Facebook violated that nation’s privacy law, and this past February the OPC initiated an investigation into the broader social networking space. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission is preparing to regulate online-behavioral advertising, a prominent feature on social networks.
Where does privacy fit in this new marketing arena?
Here’s a couple places to start for creating a privacy plan for a social media strategy:
1. Determine what data you are collecting, from who, and how you intend to use the information. Once you know that, determine how to secure it and how long you intend to keep it. This is the building block of a good social media privacy plan.
2. Integrate the social media plan into your existing privacy policy. Hopefully you already have processes for personal data access requests, privacy-choice management, privacy-complaint handling, and personal data deletion. If your organization doesn’t have these privacy processes defined, you should get on that like now.
3. Create a site monitoring and response plan. Among top privacy concerns for social networks is the ability of users to post sensitive data about other people without their consent. Users can also post their own sensitive information, such as dates of birth and account numbers, that could be used for account fraud. Organizations implementing social media strategies have trouble preventing these incidents. So far, one of the most popular methods for dealing with this is the hands-on approach. Manually monitoring sites for inappropriate posts and complaints and applying a policy for determining which to respond to and how or which to simply delete.
4. Know you regulatory compliance requirements. Each country has its own data-protection regulations, know your requirements, at home and where your customers live.
There are many benefits to being active in social media networks as a brand. There are also many new complexities for organizations’ privacy policies and processes because of it. If your marketing includes launchign new media strategies, it needs to also include creating new media privacy plans.
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