It’s no secret social media is now a key source of intelligence for corporate security professionals. But with so many social media monitoring tools to choose from; departments can easily end up choosing software that hasn’t been developed with their needs in mind, i.e. social media monitoring software built for marketing purposes.
This poor choice often impacts efficiency, results, and ultimately hurts the bottom line and, in some cases, employees.
Here are 5 tell-tale signs that’ll help you work out if the social media monitoring tool your corporate security department uses, needs an overhaul.
1. Sometimes they’re the “last to know”
News travels fast these days. Some call it “the speed of internet”. What this means is, everyone and anyone with an internet connection can learn about and/or spread the breaking news happening at your corporation.
This increases the chance that a staff member might find out things before your corporate security department does. Especially when it’s happening in a retail store or near the event your CEO is speaking at.
2. Reports are missing known threats
Lack of awareness can linger long past the date something occurred (especially for potential threats that are yet to fully develop).
When regular reports are missing developed or developing threats, that are already known to senior executives (whose lives and lively hoods depend on it), it may result in a loss of confidence from the executive team. Even when the corporate security department think they are being as effective as possible.
The wrong tooling might provide you with what looks like the most relevant and timely information, but you’re often missing the complete picture.
The right tooling, developed specifically for protecting executives, assets and supply chains, provides more advanced and targeted search capabilities (e.g. Boolean search) than typical marketing related tools. For those such tools, the focus is generally on social engagement and brand and reputation management rather than detecting potential and developing cybersecurity and physical threats.
3. Incident response times are slow
Further to point 1, if your team is unaware of a threat, or simply hear about it too late, this can have a butterfly effect impacting the overall incident response time. This can potentially put the safety of staff and executives at risk, impacting “Duty of Care” responsibilities and even impacting revenue or costs.
Having the right monitoring tool often means you can plan ahead (building out a calendar of events to monitor), giving you a better chance of being the “first to know” and therefore speeding up incident response times.
4. Small incidents often escalate
You guessed it! Catching threats early can keep small incidents… well, small.
This will save you and your team from having to deal with larger and more troublesome incidents in the future. So, how does Social Media come into this?
Sometimes the earliest signals come from the most unusual sources. Social Media, if used with the right monitoring software, can act as an early warning system for you and your team. It can even supply this early intelligence directly to your phone via SMS or email so you are always on top of new incident’s.
5. Your team is too reactive
If you’re the Head of Corporate Security and you can’t understand why your team never seems to be prepared for events such as executive travel and retail store/office openings, it could be a sign they need to move to operationally focused social media monitoring software where they can plan ahead and schedule monitoring at certain locations over certain dates, times or seasons.
This not only instils a more active team culture allowing you to get ahead of potential issues, but it also reduces stress and allows your team to be in a better frame of mind when things really matter.
Conclusion
It wasn’t that long ago that there was very little in the way of social media monitoring software tailored for corporate security professionals. Early adopters persevered, as a stop gap, with tools designed for marketers.
These days’ things are a little different:
The role of corporate security in any large corporation is becoming more important;
Social media is an open source of intelligence when it comes to protecting executives, digital, physical assets and supply chains;
Access to social media is now in the hands of the majority (wherever they are);
Threats can be indirectly identified via social media posts made by the public and media.
And, most importantly, tools have been created specifically for corporate security professionals to make use of this free intelligence source.
Are you already making the most of these new tools or is it time to make the shift?