By Dennis D. McDonald

In David Lynch’s movie DUNE, wise old Thufir Hawat says to young Paul Atreides:

You’ll make a formidable duke … but remember …  the first step in avoiding a trap is knowing one exists.

Paul responds:

But if it’s a trap why are we going?

In the movie Thufir changes the subject to Paul’s fighting lesson with the Weirding Module. That  is a good thing since, as we will see, a trap DOES exist on Arrakis, and all Paul’s preparations will be needed to survive.

While readers of this blog will know that I’m a big supporter of social media, social networking, web 2.0, and enterprise 2.0, it would be naive to think that these tools cannot be mismanaged or misused. In extreme circumstances their use might be considered a “trap,” especially if preparations are not in place to address problems when they arise.

Just as a local power utility must regularly rehearse how it would respond to a massive natural disaster that results in widespread power outages, so too a modern corporation must plan for a response to an informational disaster in which, for example, an unintended leakage of personal or medical information resulted in legal liability or public ridicule.

In the coming weeks I shall write a series of posts on this topic of “social media risk management,” beginning with an examination of the potential risks arising from social media within an organization. Please feel free to comment here and on my subsequent posts. If you have comments or suggestions about what you would like to see in the series, please let me know.

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