I had a huge response to a previous posting on Facebook inserting Wikipedia pages of Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies without their permission – or even knowledge. It is a potential public relations disaster for insurance and reinsurance companies.
Many listed insurance and reinsurance companies and large insurance and reinsurance brokers (and other large corporations) now have “Pages” which are listed under their name under the tag “Organisation”. Swiss Re and Munich Re are there. As are many, many others. The bigger the organisation, the more likely it is to have a page.
How are social media links and profiles hijacked?
A little technical detail now to follow up on last week’s post:
Getting information on this matter and what you can do to make sure the information on these pages is maintained is as clear as mud, though. Facebook seems to class these pages as “Community” pages, which were launched in April this year.
In essence they are similar to any other “Page” to which you can connect, although they won’t generate stories in a Facebook user’s News Feed, and won’t be maintained by a single author but show content that Facebook has licensed from Wikipedia under the “creative commons license”. (Click here to find out a bit about this licence).
Social media and risk management
From a risk management perspective this is very difficult (to put it mildly) and means that organisations are going to have to keep a good eye on their Wiki pages and the Facebook pages that have been generated.
For those of you confused (and rightly so), these are the types of pages out there:
- Official pages – are maintained by authorised representatives of a business and they can create and share content about the entities that they represent.
- Groups– allow companies or organisations to communicate directly with other people on Facebook about a specific subject or business.
- New Community Pages(like the ones this blog is talking about) enable users to learn more about and see what others are saying about additional topics that interest may interest them. You cannot post comments, but any related global posts will be posted below the blurb – have a look at this link to Apple Computersand see how it has linked any conversations with it below the Wiki feed.
More information on the Community Pages:
This is the email from Wikimedia Foundation’s Head of Business Development, Kul Takanao Wadhwa about the Wiki/Facebook collaboration launched earlier this year and it says:
Wikipedia articles on Facebook will further increase the reach of free knowledge on the internet. Facebook has hundreds of millions of users, and now more than 70% of their traffic is coming from outside of the US. Our hope is that many Facebook users (if they are not already) will also be inclined to join the large community of Wikipedia contributors. Facebook will follow the free licenses (CC-BY-SA) and help us find more ways people can share knowledge. Furthermore, we will be looking at other ways that both parties can cooperate in the future.
Many companies may shrug and say “our clients aren’t on Facebook”. But this is a real issue that won’t go away and steps need to be taken to manage the message that is being put out there on your behalf.
