Even if your organisation is not ready to ‘go social’, there are three critical reasons why you should secure your name and your business’s name, and close variations of them, across digital media platforms. They are:
What would you do if a crisis broke out and you were forced to go online to defend your reputation only to discover someone else owned accounts in your name, possibly even a hijacker?
This risk can be mitigated and, in an interconnected world driven by technology, should be an integral part of corporate governance.
One reason that should motivate you to sign up for social media regardless of your attitude towards it is the proliferation of parody accounts.
On the lighter side good parody accounts bring colour to online life. They are the equivalent of the funny extravert at the office who can lift the mood of everyone around them.
Parodies gain loyal followings and are highly valued, so much so that platforms have developed guidelines for creating them. For example, the parody account of Elizabeth Windsor, Queen of the United Kingdom, has over a million followers and is labelled fictional, as per Twitter’s guidelines.
The Queen satirises world events; her tweets are often funny and generally harmless as in the case of her recent April Fools’ Day joke, in which she announced her abdication.
