July 16,
2015
Auditing Your Social Media
Quick
note: I’ve done some light research
and seen where there are a few articles onlie about how companies should audit
their social media for market effectiveness.
This article is not about that.
This article is about why YOU should audit your personal &
professional social media contacts & connections on a regular basis.
While Pro
Digital is primarily a digital forensic consulting company, a great deal of my
early professional experience in criminal investigations involved online
undercover investigations. Yes, I’d
create the persona of a young girl online and conduct sting operations a-la “To
Catch a Predator”, only with many more measures put in place to ensure proper
evidence handling and successful prosecution of these cases. Because of my repeated creation of online
undercover social media accounts and daily contact with others online
conducting these types of investigations, I thought it might be useful to
spread a little wisdom with regard to overall social media usage.
Social media
has become an intimate part of most of our lives. While it’s true my octogenarian father has
not embraced Facebook, my slightly younger mother-in-law has. But Facebook is just the beginning! There’s a pretty decent likelihood that you
found this article on one of several social media outlets attributed to Pro
Digital Consulting – Twitter,
Linked
In, Google+,
Facebook Pages, etc. all
create a universe for us to connect with other people, either personally or
professionally, and network in a way our parents never even imagined. But with this ability comes added
responsibility. While some other social
media experts may disagree with me, I’ll offer a few tips from what I’ve seen
over the years catching bad guys and conducting investigations online.
Separate
or Post with Discretion
Years ago, I
created a personal Facebook page under a pseudonym. I did this because I was involved in gang and
narcotic investigations and to insulate my family from potential threats from
those I was investigating. This
pseudonym became (and still is) my account and one of the ways I connect with
friends and relatives I may not see regularly, but still wish to remain in
contact with. Because of this, however I’m
forced to abide by the same advice I give teenagers about social media: only
contact those whom you know personally
and those who you could call with relative ease. Regardless, I still make a conscious effort
to separate my personal and professional social networking. Pro Digital has a Twitter page and I have a
separate Twitter page. This helps not
only separate valued professional contacts from personal ones, but also serves
to avoid alienating potential business associates. It’s important and prudent to make the
decision to separate your personal and professional social media OR post with
extreme discretion if they are to be combined as part of your overall online
persona. This becomes a little more
difficult when we connect with co-workers (or even bosses) on our personal
social media pages.
Linked In is
a somewhat different animal. Because
Linked In is a professional social networking site and digital forensics is a
fairly small community, I will choose to connect with other digital forensic
and investigative professionals that I have not (yet) met in person. However, taking into account the normal
traffic across list serves and browsing of blog articles published in the
profession, it’s fairly easy to vet contacts as real or legitimate versus
not. Even still, I audit all of my
social media accounts regularly and I suggest you do too.
Why Audit?
It seems to
be an unfortunate side-effect to the world of social media that it’s the 21st
Century version of the popularity contest.
How many contacts can you amass in your social media world? The winner has the most. Facebook doesn’t expressly reward this, but
interestingly enough, Linked In does! I routinely
see potential contacts on Linked In that boast 500+ or 1000+ contacts. While that may be a measure of some sort of
accomplishment, the sheer number of connection requests I get from people who
fall into these categories suggests they’ll just connect with whomever for no
apparent reason other than to connect with them. That’s a bad idea.
Another
side-effect to ubiquitous social media usage is that potential employers,
clients, opposing parties in legal disputes, etc. can look at your profile(s)
and see your activity, your accomplishments and with whom you associate. Let’s face it, every profession has
clowns. I define a clown as a talker,
not a doer. Someone who makes a career
out of doing as little as possible and talking about the little bit they do as
much as possible. Another sub-set of
clown are the incompetents. Think about
your profession – You know people who fit these categories and your peers also
know the same people who fit these categories, so why would you want to be
associated with them, even if it’s just online?
Yet another
reason to audit your contacts is things change.
People change. That co-worker you
went to multiple happy hours and worked on two major projects with at your
previous company just got convicted of defrauding the same company… Do you
still want to be connected or associated with him professionally? Probably not.
The reality is that sometimes good people turn bad and sometimes good
people let bad things carry them away through any number of motivations, so it
really benefits YOU to stay abreast
of who you’re connected with and what they’re up to. Like it or not, we’re all judged by our
friends & acquaintances. Birds of a
feather… well, you know.
When to
Audit?
There’s no “best
practice” for how often to audit your social media contacts. I would suggest at the very least to do it
once a year, but it also depends on the volume of your social media usage. If you’re a 500+ or 1000+ connector on Linked
In, you may need to audit more frequently.
If, like me, you’re more cautious and discriminating about who you
connect with, you may need to do it less frequently. Just don’t let it get away from you. Speaking as one who has seen respected
friends, co-workers, clergy and professional contacts get caught up in situations
that reflect horribly on themselves and badly on those with whom they associate,
it really is an important piece to maintaining professional integrity.
What Now?
Auditing
your social media is like cleaning out your filing cabinet. It sits over there in the corner, you use it
when you need to and don’t pay attention to it when you’re not looking at it,
but it’s still very important to maintaining your professional reputation. So use these suggestions and log-on to your
Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and take a look at who you’re connected
with. If you find yourself saying “yikes”
or simply “who the hell is that?”, maybe it’s time to make the decision to
disconnect.
Trust me, they
won’t be the wiser and you’ll be better off for it!
Author:
Patrick J.
Siewert, SCERS, BCERT, LCE
Principal
Consultant
Professional
Digital Forensic Consulting, LLC
Based in
Richmond, Virginia
Available
Globally
About the Author:
Patrick Siewert is the Principal
Consultant of Pro Digital Forensic Consulting, based in Richmond,
Virginia. In 15 years of law
enforcement, he investigated hundreds of high-tech crimes, incorporating
digital forensics into the investigations, and was responsible for
investigating some of the highest jury and plea bargain child exploitation
cases in Virginia court history. A
graduate of both SCERS and BCERT (among others), Siewert continues to hone his
digital forensic expertise in the private sector while growing his consulting
business marketed toward litigators, professional investigators and
corporations.
Twitter: @ProDigital4n6
