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Tweet Breach: 140
Characters of Sheer Destruction
John Sileo
www.ThinkLikeaSpy.com
Like a wounded, cornered Doberman, I was irrational and reactive.
My blog was down, non-existent. When you earn your keep by
communicating ideas, like I do as a professional speaker, any threat to
the distribution of those ideas raises the peach fuzz on the back of
your neck. After days of being unable to reach my webmaster by office
phone, cell phone, SMS text, instant message or email, I dialed up the
pressure on him to respond. I turned to the powerful and influential
world of social media...
I tweeted him. Publicly.
@johnswebguy Where in the name of
Google Earth are you? Why won't you contact me?
[poetic license applied to save face]
140 characters that delivered the impact of a rabid canine. Yes, there
was obvious anger in my words, but they were transformed into a
venomous rant in the hands of others. Those reading it from the outside
could feel the rage I felt at having been cornered without a backup
plan. Unfortunately, in my anger, I didn't make it a direct tweet (a
private communication that only the recipient could see), so anyone
following these hyper-succinct mini-blogs could view my dirty laundry
and fill in the blanks with any back-story they liked. And fill in they
did.
In the ensuing minutes, my tweet was re-tweeted (sent out to a mass
number of recipients), screen shot (digitally captured to be preserved
forever in all its glory) and used as an example as why others
shouldn't do business with my webmaster. I had never even considered
ending my relationship with my webmaster, so driving his customers away
was the last thing on my mind.
I just wanted to know where he was!
In that instant, dumbfounded with regret, I understood the power of
social media to communicate, influence and destroy. Destroy personal
reputations. Destroy brand identity. Destroy profit margins,
relationships and open communication. As I hit the enter button, I
thought I was tossing a snowball, but quickly discovered it had the
potential to become an all-out avalanche. For all of its brevity, the
words we publish on Twitter or Facebook can be misinterpreted, read as
gospel or spread like the plague. It can be very difficult to separate
emotion from fact in 140 characters.
My webmaster contacted me from the hospital; he had just gotten out of
surgery. Fortunately, I deleted the tweet before it went totally
global, explained my mistake to my followers, apologized to my
webmaster and got down to resuscitating my blog (when he had recovered
from surgery).
Explaining what I had done to someone the following day, I used a term
that has stuck in subsequent conversations — tweet breach. Here is my current
working definition of tweet breach:
tweet•breach
n. 1. Accidentally
or intentionally exposing data through social media or other Web 2.0
applications (e.g., Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Second Life, blog posts, webmail, text
messaging, instant messaging, etc.) that would otherwise have
remained acceptably private, confidential, anonymous or otherwise
properly controlled by the owner or agent responsible for the
information. 2. Self-inflicted
tweet breech (common) is the act of accidentally or reactively
releasing one's own private information without thinking through the
consequences.
Examples: a) posting an individual's
personally identifying information (phone number, credit card account,
social security number, etc.) without their consent, knowledge and
understanding; b) posting
someone's physical whereabouts, personal history or confidential
information without their agreement; c)
improperly revealing proprietary corporate information such as
intellectual capital, corporate financials, business processes, deal
secrets, organizational structure or other sensitive commercial data; d) improperly using social media as
a tool of leverage, extortion (if you don't do this, I will...), or
revenge (posting sordid details about your ex, dirty laundry about your
former employer, etc.).
I learned so much as a product of
my experience that it will provide materials for years to come. Let me
share a few of the many fundamental takeaways that you should keep in
mind both personally and professionally:
- Posting is Public. This seems so
obvious, but it is constantly overlooked. When you post (I use the term
post to encompass tweeting, blogging, commenting, writing on a wall,
publishing to a website, and certain types of texting, instant
messaging, etc.), you are making the information available to everyone
on the internet (unless you somehow restrict access).
In-person relationships are often subtle. For example, you probably
wouldn't tell the same joke to your young child as you would your
closest friend. You wouldn't tell your boss about a successful job
interview with another company in the same way that you would tell your
sister. But when you post these items online, you are collapsing those
layers of distinction, or access, into a one-dimensional view. Everyone
has equal and identical access to your joke and your job news, whether
you want them to or not.
Denial and misunderstanding of this basic principle, that posting is
public and will be seen by others, is what leads teenagers to populate
MySpace with pictures and content that they would never want their
future employers, college admissions officers or even parents, to
see.
- Posting is Permanent. When you
post, you are creating a permanent piece of digital DNA that, for all
practical purposes, never disappears. Your words and photos and videos
are forwarded, replicated, backed up, quoted and made a permanent part
of the internet firmament. In other words, if you post it, you'd better
be willing to claim ownership of it for the rest of your life. It is
very hard to think a week in advance, let alone 20 years. Would George
W. Bush have ever been President had he tweeted his DUIs or possession
of Cocaine arrest? The viral and permanent and traceable nature of the
information would have doomed his chances.
- Posts are Exploitable. Whether they
are used against you in a court of law (yes, posts have been used as
admissible evidence), used by identity thieves and social engineers
(e.g., once a con knows your social network, they can easily use it
against you to establish undeserved trust), or aggregated by companies
that want to sell you something, posts can and will be used in ways
that we average users are not currently considering.
Without question, social media and
social networking are killer apps and are here for the long haul. They
fulfill too deep a need and too profitable a role in our lives and
businesses to write off as a fad. Fortunately, there are concrete
solutions for preventing tweet breach and for minimizing damage when it
does inevitably happen. I am already experiencing corporations
(probably because of their increased risks and liability) beginning to
pro-act on the ever evolving side effects of social media. For
starters, they are gaining a competitive advantage by:
- Educating their workforce on
the benefits and drawbacks of social media, including tweet breach,
productivity gains and losses, social media exhaustion,
etc.
- Establishing guidelines for
how to use Twitter, Facebook and Web 2.0 tools in responsible,
productive ways that deliver the greatest ROI with the least risk
- Incorporating age-old ideas
of etiquette, editorial policy and discretion into the fabric of their
new media strategies
To learn more about tweet breach
and how to protect yourself or your corporation, visit www.TweetBreach.com.
About the author: After losing his business to data breach and his
reputation to identity theft, John
Sileo became America's leading identity
theft and data breach speaker. His recent clients include the
Department of Defense, the FDIC, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Pfizer. To
learn more about John, www.ThinkLikeaSpy.com. Permission granted for use on
DrLaura.com.
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