Social media governance: I like it more than dolphins

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a marine biologist because I loved the ocean, dolphins were cool and I really wanted to learn how to scuba dive. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would have a burning passion for… social media governance. Of course, social media didn’t exist when I was a kid, so maybe that had something to do with it. But here I am, leading a major social media program for a major global company and caring very deeply and passionately about the uber-sexy topic of social media governance.

Why? Because as the head of social media for a big global company, I wear a thousand hats, and usually just in a single day. But when I tell people about my job, I tell them it really boils down to two things:

1)    Being the No. 1 champion for the advancement and continued improvement of social media at Cargill.

2)    Keeping our accounts safe.

If I’m not doing those two things to the best of my ability every single day, I am not doing my job.

If you’re the head of your team, governance should mean more than simply knowing all the passwords and understanding who owns the accounts. That’s table stakes. It should include things like:

• Does your company own all of your accounts (both channels AND ad accounts), or do individuals or agencies own some of them? Are they all centrally managed by your team? Are they attached to individual email addresses or (worse) personal gmail accounts that can walk out the door if the person leaves the company/agency?

• How do you handle turnover? Do you change passwords after someone leaves as part of your mandatory process? Do you even know when someone leaves?

• Do you have a process for resetting all account passwords immediately if you need to in case of a security breach?

• Do you know who has native access to your accounts? Should anyone have it?

• Do you audit regularly to understand which third-party apps have access to your accounts and your data? How about partner access, agency access or other ways you may be letting your data out of your control?

• Do you know what you spend on social media across your company?

If you are a member of a social media team but are not the boss, you have responsibility here, too. It could be that your boss is not terribly governance-minded and you should raise some of these items to his or her attention. It could be that you could take ownership of these things and establish yourself as a leader in your own right. But someone at your company needs to take ownership of social media governance, or you are doing everyone a disservice and opening the company up to unneeded risk. Here were some alternative titles I considered for this post:

• “Imagine waking up to find your company is the one that tweeted a horrible thing when the community manager accidentally tweeted from the company account instead of his or her personal one.”

• “Governance – a great way to avoid getting sued.”

• “Why knowing what’s going on is just better because it is.”

• “You do like your job, right?”

My personal prediction is that this will become such a big area with real expertise required that eventually large companies will have full-time social media governance specialists. I know of some companies that already do.

Now – just to consider this a balanced post – it is important to note that you can over-index on governance. It’s difficult to strike the right balance. On one hand, you want to keep your accounts safe and limit your company’s risk. But it’s easy to go overboard and come across as an overbearing control freak or the social media police. I will admit sometimes I have been too heavy-handed in my zeal for making sure our accounts are safe. The key, I think, is to not just bring the hammer but to help people understand the why. And if you do the education part correctly, you not only get compliance, but you also get people who advocate on your behalf and help you enforce the governance. Over time, it should just become the way you do social media.

When I think about my legacy at Cargill, I want it to be all about bringing the social media program to maturity, creating world-class social media and never being a company in the news because our Twitter account got hacked. NOT doing something never gets the attention that doing something does, and that’s OK. But to me, it will be just as important and meaningful as the things that are a little more obvious.

That, and scuba diving. I still really want to learn how to scuba dive. Because dolphins.