Social is more than a company account

There are a lot of companies that have a company facebook or linkedin page. Many have a corporate twitter account, or more than one. This is a good thing and those companies are likely doing good with their social presence.

The problem with this approach is it really doesn't scale that well. Imaging a company with 1000 employees. If they have one or two people focused on social media, that's good. They can probably build a few thousand followers, have regular blog posts and updates on their corporate pages.

If they spent that time and effort on training the 1000 employees on the proper use of social media, encouraged their employees to tweet, or post photos on pinterest or talk about work on their facebook pages or in their linkedin updates then instead of reaching a few thousand people, now you can reach a few hundred thousand people.

I recently had a linkedin update turn into a really good sales lead. The interesting thing was I am not the social media representative of my company. In fact I'm not in sales, or marketing. I do though update my linkedin connections with relevant updates from my company and one of those is what prompted the lead.

Now there are some risks which is why you need to train and educate people to avoid some of the "twitter disasters" that regularly make the media. You also need to have a great company culture and employee morale. Luckily we have both but if employees hate your company or aren't engaged then this is either not going to provide much value, or can cause brand damage.Though if you have unhappy employees you really need to fix that regardless of social media.

Leveraging the entire company to help market and brand your compay and products can really help increase awareness and revenue. It's not without risks, but all rewards come with risks.

The problems with BYOD

I recently posted a blog post on the Enterasys blog  talking about the 8 types of BYOD.  Essentially BYOD is made up of 3 attributes that related to LAN connection, Management and Data. It can range from essentially the same technical problems we have today with corporate managed devices on our networks and connecting to our data, to someone's "personal" iphone.

Each of these situations brings up a different problem and solution set required. In summary though it works out like this.

1. If it is on your network, you can control it with firewalls, network policy and SIEM tools.
2. If it is managed by you, then you can use MDM to protect yourself.
3. If it is accessing your data then authentication, like Okta, with automatic provision and de-provision can help.

The corollary to these are.
1. If it's not on your network, traditional network tools won't help. In other words a hardware appliance on my network has zero control over my 3g connected Android device.
2. If you can't manage the device, you can't control the device.
3. If it's not your data the best you can do is have a policy and react accordingly.

There is no protection from someone using their iphone, on their 4g data plan connecting to their facebook. The best you can do is watch and react appropriately.