Maryland is wrong.

Every employer should have the right to ask for your Facebook password. And they should fire (or not hire) you the second you agree to hand it over. That’s right: failure to give your boss Facebook access shouldn’t be grounds for termination; giving your boss Facebook access should get you canned. Why? Because any employee that’s desperate or gullible enough to hand over a personal password to his boss might as well tattoo SECURITY RISK on his forehead.

Social engineering attacks are based on one thing: the attacker convincing the victim she is entitled to legitimately access private information. If a potential employee is handing over private data in the interview, that’s a pretty fair indicator he has a poor grasp of what constitutes private information and/or legitimate access. That’s something an employer should know before hiring anyone. If a current employee does the same thing during a random supervisor sit-down, the boss should seriously reevaluate the employee’s security privileges, and possibly his employment.

By the same token, any job applicant asked to disclose her Facebook login should walk out of the interview. Unless you’re applying for a job requiring national security clearance levels, your employer has about as much right to your Facebook account as it does to read your private diary, search your medicine cabinet or rifle through your underwear drawer. Any place with that sense of entitlement or paranoia is not a place anyone should want to work.

(The issue of requiring students to hand over Facebook login details is separate; putting in legal protections for the privacy of minors is almost always a good idea. Kids don’t always have the resources or wherewithal to stand up to abusive authority figures.)

Maryland is trying to legislate common decency and common sense. While I applaud the instinct, the password handover issue is too convenient and powerful a signal to outlaw; it makes careless employees and clueless employers much easier to spot.

Okay, maybe not.

In all seriousness, Maryland is probably right to ban the practice of requesting employee and student social networking credentials — if only to save teachers and employers from themselves. Those levels of access are almost certain to be abused (or inadvertently exposed) by overzealous (or clumsy) supervisors and thereby open up companies, schools and states to all kinds of harassment lawsuits.

That such a ban is even necessary is proof enough that the general public has very untrustworthy instincts about proper password and access security. If you think your online data is safe, bear in mind you’re sharing systems with people who think nothing of asking for — or handing over — access with very little consideration of the long term consequences. You’re sharing the information superhighway with people who are not only careless drivers, but who will let almost anyone who asks borrow their car, too.

Hope you’ve got a good backup plan.

What is the value of a tweet? How much does Yelp value a review? As a participant in the social media economy, how much value does your participation create for companies like Facebook and LinkedIn?

These questions came to mind recently as we had a deep discussion at Backupify about the value of data in the cloud. Sometimes people ask me why they should backup their cloud data. The answer that I give comes from asking thousands of Backupify customers why they do it – because the data is valuable, and it is always important to protect valuable assets.

Quantifying the value of data to a business is relatively easy. For customers who use our Backup for Google Apps or Backup for Salesforce products to protect their corporate data, it boils down to three basic concerns:

1. How difficult it would be to recreate that data
2. How much revenue would be lost if the data was lost
3. How much productivity would be lost if important data could not be accessed

The value of social data (for both consumers and businesses) is a little bit harder to quantify. We decided to take a shot at it by building off some publicly available information to figure out what social data, which social media companies, and what social media actions are the most valuable. The results are in posted in the Backupify Social Data Value Infographic below.

We plotted the data in two different ways. The first is by average per-user value, which of course has Facebook as king of the hill. The second plot shows how many users a service would require to reach a $10 billion valuation. As you can see, most of the companies are unlikely to ever get that big.

So take a look, and let us know what you think. Are Yelp reviews really worth more than tweets? Who should we have put on the graph that didn’t make it? Which pieces of social media are over or under valued? Leave a comment, write a post, or just tweet @backupify with your thoughts.

Click for full size version

1. Adria Richards
Adria Richards is a tech consultant specializing in workflow efficiency. She is also a very familiar face at blogging and technology conferences across the country and has inspired thousands by helping them embrace their inner geek.

We follow Adria to get the latest in the world of Cloud Apps, Social Media, Google Apps and SaaS. Adria never fails to update us on the important talks and conferences going on in the tech world and even provides her expert opinion on topics affecting businesses and consumers alike.

Twitter handle: @adriarichards
Recent tweet: “Just got email invite to test drive Real Time Google Analytics! http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html”

2. Susan Cline

Susan Cline (aka Google Apps Expert) specializes in developing and delivering adoption solutions for organizations moving to Google Apps. Susan has also authored a series of Google Apps courses on the subjects of Google Docs, Google Mail and Google Calendar.

We follow Susan to get deep insights into anything and everything related to Google Apps. Susan’s our go-to resource for bridging the gap between understanding what Google Apps is and actually using it to its full potential.

Twitter handle: @GoogleAppsSusan
Recent tweet: “10 reasons to trust Google in business http://t.co/8K34xNdT. We’ve got a lively discussion going on in the comment section #googleapps”

3. Steven Peltzman

Steve Peltzman is the Chief Technology Business Officer at Forrester Research. He made his bones as the CIO at The Museum of Modern Art during MoMA’s landmark $858 million building project (which included a great deal of technology infrastructure).

We follow Steve to understand the scope of IT and technology integration in businesses today, all from a successful CTOs perspective, along with the words of wisdom that Steve often dishes out during the day.

Twitter handle: @stevenpeltzman
Recent tweet: “Understand that #cloud risk is not a single entity but one in a long, long chain. What’s the total risk chain of NOT going cloud?”

4. Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a business analyst that specializes in the cloud — specifically how online apps can increase business agility. When he’s not writing about cloud-based organizations, he’s directly advising or participating in them.

We follow Ben to get his expert views on enterprise software, software integration, platforms and infrastructure but most importantly, we admire Ben for his exceptional ability to articulate technology simply for everyday users.

Twitter handle: @benkepes
Recent Tweet: “For the one person on the planet who doesn’t agree that Steve Jobs was prescient, watch this http://youtu.be/Or7zaUaP-J8 #Cloud #Amazing”

5. David Linthicum

David Linthicum is the CTO of Blue Mountain Labs, but he still finds time to regularly write about developing trends in cloud computing, SOA and data integration.

We actively follow David to get the latest in the world of technology as it happens. Expect David to fill you up with news and reviews on topics ranging from data analytics, business intelligence to cloud-based applications and integration.

Twitter handle: @DavidLinthicum
Recent Tweet: “Beware Best Practices, they can kill productivity, innovation and growth – Adopt Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter http://lnkd.in/QwfE-H”

6. Krishnan Subramanian

“Krish” is an ex-physicist turned tech evangelist who dabbles in a dozen subjects and pursuits at once. The Next Web named Krish as one of the Top 25 Influential Voices tweeting about Cloud Computing.

We follow Krish for a sneak peak on high impact topics in the fields of Open Source, Cloud Computing and the interface between them. Krish also occasionally treats us with his tweets on progressive political ideas.

Twitter handle: @krishnan
Recent tweet: “Gmail’s new theme should let me set the “Comfortable, cozy or compact” setting for each device/browser instead of account. #besmart”

7. Matt Rosoff

Matt Rosoff was the the founding editor at CNET from 1995 to 2000. Today he’s Silicon Alley Insider’s West Coast Editor. In between he was an analyst for Directions on Microsoft for 10 years. We wish we had his resume.

We trust Matt to keep us updated on the latest in the world of tech and the developments in the valley. But what’s most entertaining is the wittiness Matt adds to his tweets, that make them a must-read.

Twitter handle: @MattRosoff
Recent Tweet: “Look At How Google Is Backing Away From The Idea Of Google+ As A Social Network $GOOG http://read.bi/t3i6Ny”

8. Loraine Lawson

Loraine is a tech journalist with bylines that span IT Business Edge and TechRepublic, with content aimed squarely at CIOs and high-level IT managers.

Loraine tweets regularly on key issues of data and process integration, such as SOA (Service-oriented architecture). Follow Loraine to get quality information and views in the data integration sphere.

Twitter Handle: @LoraineLawson
Recent Tweet: “So, no opinions on integration and internal clouds? Is internal #cloud an oxymoron? I feel like it is.”

9. Om Malik

Om Malik needs no introduction but for those (few) who don’t know him;
OM is a venture partner at True Ventures and founder of the leading tech blog, GigaOM, which was named among the top 100 most influential blogs on the Web, by CNET. Om has closely watched the Internet revolution and is one of the most well-connected people in the valley.

We follow OM for his great insights on VCs, hot startups in the tech industry, future of social networks and basically everything you would want to know about the Silicon Valley.

Twitter handle: @om
Recent Tweet: “my counter argument to Mark Z that without Silicon Valley there wasn’t gonna be Facebook. Read before commenting. http://gigaom.com/2011/11/03/sorry-mark-facebook-needed-silicon-valley/”

10. Kevin L. Jackson

Kevin L. Jackson is the founder of the Cloud Musings blog, which covers the rather niche (but giant) topic of cloud adoption by government agencies. Kevin’s street cred comes from his post
as General Manager, Cloud Service at NJVC, a heavyweight tech contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

We follow Kevin to keep up with cloud computing related technologies and their use in public sector to support net-centric operations. Kevin expertise is reflected in his tweets and that is precisely the reason we follow him.

Twitter Handle: @Kevin_Jackson
Recent Tweet: “NIST releases ‘Bible of cloud implementation’ http://gcn.com/articles/2011/11/04/nist-cloud-tech-roadmap-impact.aspx”
So, that is our top 10 list of people to follow in the cloud computing space. Please feel free to add to this list if you have someone you like following to get your dose of the latest in cloud computing. We would love to hear your thoughts.

From a technical perspective, Twitter added a third access control. Previously an app could request read access, write access, or both. Now an app must also request direct message access. We need to make some modifications to our code base to support this option, and then we need a rollout plan for the re-authentication. We don’t have an estimate yet of how long this will take, but it will be priority in our next sprint, so it shouldn’t be long.

For Backupify users that employed our service prior to the API change, every direct message you sent or received before the access changeover remains safely archived in our system. Once your account has been re-authenticated, Backupify will archive all your Twitter direct messages, including those that you sent or received during this transition period.

If you have questions or concerns, please feel free to email us.

Last week, fellow Bostonian and marketing thought-leader David Meerman Scott published a fantastic article interviewing a law professional who works with lawyers on the use of marketing and social media. The post was titled, f“Is social media worth the risk? A lawyer’s perspective” interviewing Vivienne Storey, General Manager of BlandsLaw, a small law firm specializing in Australian employment law.

As David explains of Storey, “In her role at a law firm, she advises global companies such as Deutsche Bank, ING Bank, Nestle, Phillip Morris and Deloitte about social media in the workplace.” Storey provided a very unique perspective on the use of social media for law firms in her video interview with Scott.

“There is no point trying to prevent people using social media because if they are not doing at work, they probably have smartphones and will be doing it under their desk if they’re not allowed to do it own their own computer and they definitely will be doing it at home.” Storey’s statement here could not be more true. With over 700 million people now on Facebook and tons more joining Twitter every day, it is almost inevitable that most of your employees will be using social network to some degree.

When asked how law firms should deal with social media, Storey pointed out that, “It’s better to train your employees to use social media appropriately, properly, responsibly, well-for-purposely for your organization rather than to pretend it doesn’t exist.” We agree completely. It’s a fact that social media is a pervasive technology and instead of ignoring it, why not embrace it? There are ways to use it in a safe manner just by creating a social media policy to guide employees.

“What do companies need to think about in terms of guidelines for social media?” asked Scott. “The basic principles to cover in guidelines are to cover your risk management issues. Things like confidentiality of company information and employee or supplier information or potential deals. Privacy issues with their employees, clients, IP issues. Brand protection is very important. Their image, company image is crucial and how that’s portrayed.” This is usually confidential information to a majority of companies, many of which like to keep it that way.

However, Scott asked if companies today should still keep this information 100% confidential. Storey responded, “Policies should absolutely be made public. It’s a great publicity tool which is what all of social media is about. it’s another way of saying ‘we are involved in social media’, ‘we want to engage with clients’ and its a great way to show the general public what you are actually trying to do on social media.”

Today, social media is all about transparency and trust. If a firm implements certain policies that pertain to their customers and clients, it is good business to share that information publicly with them, not in the tiny fine print at the bottom of a mailed document.

We at Backupify have spoken with many professional lawyers, specifically at LegalTechNY this past spring, and realized that almost all of them are experiencing this same dilemma: to get involved or not to get involved? After discussing the pros and cons, many realized that social media really is an impending technology to just about every business and they can  no longer ignore it.

The major drawback to the use of social media in law is the process of developing a social media policy to direct employees on how to use it appropriately for work. The other aspect is complying to the multitude of regulations, one of which is a records retention program. For law firms, government agencies, schools and non-profits alike who are looking to adhere to these regulations, many have found Backupify to be a great solution for archiving this data. Don’t take our word for it, though, see what others are saying about our archiving service here.

A couple important points that these panelists discussed were:

• Federal agencies are just now starting to share best practices with each other
• Officials are finding it hard to consistently identify, capture and retain official records on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Each agency is moving in its own direction but there needs to be a unified way for all agencies to retain these records
• There are risks for both engaging and not engaging on social media – If you do engage, you can reach the public at crucial times with pertinent information but you need to be mindful of the necessity of retaining those messages. If you don’t engage, you may miss out on important opportunities yet will avoid losing control of your messaging.

NASA’s social networking manager, Emma Antunes, explained that, “In my experience, retention of records is easy, destruction is hard.” Agencies want to be involved in these mediums to reach the mass public but also realize that once they publish a message, they ultimately lose control of it. In that case, agencies certainly recognize that retention tools are needed in order to keep a copy of every message. “How do we retain legacy records if we don’t control them?” asked Antunes.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s CIO, Darren Ash, explained that their agency approached this issue at a different angle. Before they created social media accounts, they stepped back and looked at their existing retention policies. Ash brought together legal, IT, union and communication managers to determine how these new social media tools could be used to further NRC’s mission while still following a records management strategy. From this meeting, they developed a blog with retention in mind–every 60 days their blog morphs into a PDF to ensure that the content of each post is retained. This blog serves as their main public social communication tool.

Evidently, there are still major steps that federal agencies need to take to get to a level of equilibrium between social sharing and records retention. First, agencies need to proactively discuss best practices together to help each other learn. Next, individual agencies must sensibly sit down and determine the mission of using social media and how they can retain their messages on these mediums. Once this process is streamlined and more fluid among organizations, there will emerge standard practices and a higher level of comfort within this communication channel.

We’ve spoken to many government agencies who have a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account and have found that a good deal or these organizations are now comfortable sharing agency information with the public. Many have found it extremely useful in spreading emergency notifications. The next step in this process is to determine how they can protect themselves by creating a formalized retention policy.

Does your agency currently use any social media sites? Are your currently implementing a records retention policy? Why or why not?

Do you know what are the best tools to identify brand evangelists and industry influencers? What if you lose important customer contact information from your Facebook fan page or Twitter account?

Tomorrow at 2pm ET, we are teaming up with two other Boston-based companies, Hubspot and oneforty, in a webinar to walk you through the process of generating customer leads and turning them into brand evangelists.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• How to generate leads in the first place
• How to efficiently monitor conversations and brand mentions
• What tools to use for rewarding advocates
• How to manage and document your conversations on social media

Sign up for the webinar now!

Bonus: All webinar attendees will automatically be entered in an iPad giveaway sponsored by Nimble, a social relationship management solution.

We hope to see you there!

First, it needs to be noted that at the time we have two Twitter archive formats. Our ‘old’ version is located on our legacy platform. (You may remember we switched Backupify’s platform from PHP to Ruby on Rails.) The old style of backups reside on the PHP side, the new version resides on Ruby on Rails.

If you are a legacy customer (meaning you have been using our backup system since before October) then your backups most likely reside on the PHP platform. If you’re unsure, log on, go to the Archives tab and see if you are brought to the below screen:

If you see the above screen, lets continue (if you see another screen, this means you’re account and backups reside on our new Rails platform, so read further down for details)

From the drop down menu in the Archives section, choose Twitter. Once clicked, you’ll see a list of links including a comprehensive PDF file we’ve generated that includes your Twitter bio and all of your Tweets (remember, if you signed up with us and had over 3,200 tweets, Twitter’s API only allows us to pull the most recent 3,200. However, every consecutive backup will backup more tweets – after awhile you will have accumulated much more than 3,200 tweets on Backupify). This serves as a timeline for all your Twitter activity. There are currently no links in the PDF to the tweet from Twitter, but you can click on your Twitter handle within the PDF to be directed to your actual Twitter profile.

Your Twitter backup also includes:

• Sent and received direct messages
• Favorited tweets
• Followers and following lists
• Mentions from others
• Your own tweets

When you click on any one of these links, for example ‘Favorites’, you will be brought to a feed of all your activity within this folder. Again, you will not be brought to any individual tweet, direct message, or mention when you click on a link, but you will be brought to that specific part of your profile, such as the ‘Favorites’ section.

If you’re on the new Rails Platform, you will see the following Archives screen:

Note: If you are on the old platform and want to migrate to the new platform, simply click on the box to the right (see photo here) once you log on and you will automatically be transferred to the new system. We are in the process of moving all legacy Twitter users from our PHP platform to the Rails platform. Soon, you will not have to switch between platforms and there will be one standard Twitter backup version. Please bear with us during this transition period.

From the Rails Archive section, select the desired Twitter account of which you would like to view archives. Right now, this data might not make much sense to you, but trust us, all the necessary data is there in full when Twitter allows us to restore (Read here as to why we cannot yet restore Twitter).

What you will see is a list of tweet data including the tweet ID number, node type, and the day it was backed up. When you click on ‘Details’ to the left, you will see this. Since you can’t do much with this data until restore is available, we have also made available a PDF to visualize your tweets in a sensible format. Click ‘Generate Twitter PDF Book’ and you will be emailed this document shortly after.

While we realize these archives are not ideal, we are working as hard as we can with what Twitter’s API gives us to allow you to do as much as you can with your archives. The PDF seems to be the most popular feature of our archive formats so far, but we are excited to offer you more to do with this data in the coming months. If there is a particular format or method you’d like to employ to view your Twitter archives, please feel free to let us know in the comments section.

Don’t yet have a Backupify Twitter backup account? Sign up here.

The bottom line answer is that Twitter and Facebook don’t allow us to truly restore data back into the service. This is due to the fact that we can’t ‘backdate’ content to the time it was originally posted. For example, if you lost tweets between October 22 and November 1 and want to input those tweets back to Twitter, there is no way to backdate the tweets to the time and day they were originally published. The only way they could be put back into the service is to have them posted to the current day and time.

We could retweet all your old tweets, but they would hit the Twitter stream today as a giant explosion of content. We really don’t think your followers would like this. We could import all your Facebook statuses back into Facebook, but your friends may think your account has been hacked if they see twenty updates all at once on their news feed — especially if those updates are repeats of posts you made weeks ago. You don’t want to lose a Facebook friend over self-inflicted echo-spam.

We wish this process was easier. As soon as Twitter and Facebook allow backdating of data, we’ll be able to perform a true restore of these services.

For the time being, you can use this data for:

• Assurance that it’s never truly gone
• To save links and photos you’ve shared regardless of if they’re not available on the actual service
• To have in the case of a needed restore when the APIs allow for backdating

Plenty of users just want their lost Facebook photos or misplaced Twitter links back, even if they can’t backdate them into Facebook or Twitter. For those users, Backupify has got your back.

Records Retention

All social media communications sent out from your firm to customers must be retained, as it relates to the business. If your firm utilizes Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, etc., to post information to customers and clients, you are required to archive these. Backupify backs up all of these services in one platform, allowing quick and easy archiving and management of your social media accounts, something with which FINRA will be quite happy.

Suitable Communications

If a broker-dealer communication requires sensitive information to be discussed, you must conduct it over a secure platform so no confidential information is leaked. Some social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, have private messaging which allows for secure communications while others do not. Always consider the type of information you are discussing over a highly public social network before continuing the conversation. If it involves private information, carry on the conversation over a secure messaging platform, via email or offline.

Supervising Electronic Communications

FINRA Regulatory Notice 10-06 states, “Communications that recommend specific investment products often present greater challenges for a firm’s compliance program than other communications… They may trigger the FINRA suitability rule [above], thus creating possible substantive liability for the firm or a registered representative.” Due to the sensitive nature of investments and banking, firms today must be very careful with what they discuss online.

Blogs FINRA defines a static company blog as an advertisement for their offerings. If your firm has a blog, you must first obtain approval for each posting. Blogs that are interactive – that is, those that allow comments and replies – is considered a real-time interactive form of communication and does not require prior approval, but needs to be under supervision much like social media communications.

Social Media The same basic rules go for social media. Static content, including bios, profiles and wall information must be approved before posted. Real-time communications (i.e. Tweets) that occur on these platforms don’t need prior approval before posted, but are subject to supervision and regulation.

In order to supervise the real-time communications on social media, firms should adopt regulatory procedures. Regulatory Notice 10-06 explains, “Firms may employ risk-based principles to determine the extent to which the review of incoming, outgoing and internal electronic communications is necessary for the proper supervision of their business.” This means that some types of communications may need prior approval while others will just be reviewed on a case by case basis.

Account Restrictions

Wondering if employees should be restricted from having a social media profile? FINRA explains “persons who participate in social media sites for business purposes are appropriately supervised, have the necessary training and background to engage in such activities, and do not present undue risks to investors.” Essentially, only employees who have prior approval and training are allowed to create a social media profile and post information publicly. It is a good idea to first consider who in your firm is considered a compliance risk in the past and limit their access to a public social media site.

Third-Party Posts

Regarding posts by customers or third parties on social media sites created by a firm, FINRA does not consider them subject to the same regulations. Thus, prior approval and regulations do not apply. The only two instances where a third-party post would be subject to regulations are: (1) The firm assisted with the content preparation or (2) The firm has explicitly or implicitly endorsed or approved the content.

Is your firm preparing for FINRA audits or have you already been audited? Leave your suggestions below for additional ways to be in compliance with Regulatory Notice 10-06.

I read a great article by The Financial Brand yesterday which outlined five ways financial institutions can best use social media:

1. Networking

As a banking professional, did you ever think you’d have the need to network with others outside of your company or branch? Many assume that social media’s main draw is its ability to draw buzz and build community, but in fact it’s a great resource for connecting people who share common interests.

You can find many like-minded banking professionals via Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs to share ideas and knowledge in just a few clicks. Once considered highly secretive and proprietary, banking knowledge is now more widely shared and discussed in this open knowledge era.

For example, say you have a question regarding a new law put in place. If you want to understand it better, what better way to quickly get an answer than to ask your community via a tweet, LinkedIn discussion, or blog post?

Just a few years ago, this concept was unheard of. Today, with a vast array of technologies available, you can leverage your online network to learn from and also teach others.

2. Listen

If you know even a few things about marketing, you probably know that listening is the #1 most important task to improve your marketing and product offering. There are some great conversations happening online regarding banking, you just need to be at the right place at the right time to hear them. Social media monitoring accomplishes this.

You have two choices to interact on social media: passively or proactively. When you are passive, you are simply reading and listening to the conversations, but not contributing in any way. When you are proactive, you will be joining the conversation with comments, questions, and feedback.

How it works:

You read a tweet saying, “I HATE XYZ bank because they have ridiculous interest rates and terrible customer support.” This would be an instance where you should proactively jump in and respond. That customer is probably not expecting a response from your company, so receiving one from your bank would be beneficial for both parties. From there, you can dive deeper into their problem and frustrations and hopefully solve it for them. The best way to do this is to continue the conversation offline Twitter via email or the phone.

Another example: You read a Facebook post that says a person is signing up for your bank for a particular purpose but with no negative or extremely positive comment included, you can take the passive approach and just take the feedback for what it is.

3. Customer Support

Many companies today are utilizing social media as a support channel. You will find that people use sites like Twitter to voice complaints, dissatisfaction, usability questions, etc. If people are voicing their opinions here, consider yourself lucky. This means your customers are actively looking for a solution, leaving you the great opportunity to respond. Reach out to those with a problem or issue to reason with them and solve their conundrum. Every time you respond and solve a problem, you are retaining and enhancing your customer relationships and business in general. If you solve a tricky or very important question, you may even generate a brand evangelist.

Check out Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Wachovia for their awesome use of social media customer support.

4. Social Responsibility

Social media is a great outlet to forge important community relations. If you’re a local bank, why not interact with a local cause and get others involved via Twitter or Facebook?

You could also develop creative challenges for which your online community can participate and donate. This will not only engage them with your brand, but it will help them feel good about their actions while also helping out a cause in need.

These charitable donations will help you with online community building and business partnerships, building awareness, and developing relationships with top-level executives in the area.

5. Public Relations

Social media can be used to promote new product releases, events, programs, etc. Chances are, reporters and bloggers are on the look out for these activities. By making this information publicly available for them, their job is now that much easier.

You should also make available on your website a press kit which includes programs with which you’re involved, charities to which you donate, annual reports, quarterly statements, contact information, and links to your social media profiles.

Social media can also help calm the waters of an online PR crisis. If a major controversy, CEO scandal, or unfavorable policy goes viral online, your social media outlets area there for you to release statements and respond to people.

It is important to develop an online crisis management plan in the case of any major issue. That way, when or if one does occur, you’ll be ready and armed to respond.

While there are generally “more important things to do” than sitting on social networks on a daily basis monitoring your brand, don’t use this as an excuse to not get involved at all. At the least, you should set up Twitter and Facebook fan page accounts for your brand as a placeholder to share news occasionally and be ready to interact if needed.

There are important conversations happening online, don’t get left in the dust and make a major mistake like Motrin did.

Due to FINRA compliance rules, many financial institutions are now required to archive their online accounts. Sign up for a social media backup plan today to ensure you are compliant with their regulations and archiving all communications.

If you think about it for a minute, how spooky would it be if someone hacked your Twitter account? How frightening would it be to find all your emails on Gmail were suddenly lost? How creepy would it be knowing that some unknown person had access to all your data? And how heart throbbingly scary would it be to know that if lost, your data may not be replaceable?

Unfortunately, being subject to an account hack, accidental deletion with no recovery method, or locked out of your account for an unknown period of time can be just as scary, if not more, than “All Hallow’s Eve”.

Fortunately, Backupify has got your back when it comes to safeguarding and protecting your online data. This Halloween, don’t let your data get away and goblins attack your personal online accounts. Sign up today for a free Backupify social media backup account.

Happy Halloween!

This was the message that filled up our Twitter stream all day:

Biggest Senate Egos 2010: #9 John Cornyn’s horse fetish! http://slate.me/aqTanX

Not only is this annoying for the account holder, but it could have significantly affected their Twitter influence. People who did not recognize what was going on might have unfollowed them, and both those that stayed on and dropped the victim’s Twitter feed likely had a very different opinion of the user — either in terms of political stance or security prowess.

The social damage is bad enough, but the real issue is that the victim can’t use Twitter to apologize to the lost followers. Twitter doesn’t keep an accessible record of people who have stopped following you, so unless the victim has a photographic memory of every Twitter follower ever attached to the hacked account, there’s no straightforward way to document — let alone contact — those lost followers.

Imagine it: All your hard work to get followers and make new connections, gone.

After realizing what was going on with the victim’s account, we tweeted about it, hoping they were using Backupify, or a similar backup, to prevent any data loss. One of our followers tweeted back a great response:

FirewheelBrew wrote, “So many people think it will never happen to them. An ounce of prevention (backup) is worth a pound of cure (data recovery).” Indeed, the cost of prevention is always cheaper than the cost of recovery —  especially if full recovery is technically impossible.

If this hacker actually corrupted the victim’s account by deleting tweets and unfollowing people, there would be no way to recover the data other than with an independent backup. Fortunately, it seems this morning that the victim’s account is back to normal, but there was the chance that it could have turned out much worse.

And for those who think this could never happen to you, try doing a Google News search on Firesheep. Firesheep is a very popular Firefox plug-in designed specifically to steal log-ins from public Wi-Fi hotspots. Hacking has gotten so easy the hackers are giving away consumer hacking tools.

Still think it can’t happen to you?

Before it’s too late, make sure you have your Twitter (and other social networking sites) backed up. Don’t let this happen to you without a backup plan.

Trapani discussed the emergence of Facebook’s new download feature, along with its benefits and drawbacks. She noted that the download is manual, so if something goes wrong with your account (i.e. an accidental deletion or a hacked account), you may not be able to download the data you truly need. Trapani pointed out the importance of having an automatic, scheduled backup as the best solution.

We made public our excitement last week with Facebook’s pro data liberation move, following in the footsteps of Google’s data liberation actions earlier this year. Our CEO, Rob May, declared “We would love to see every company provide push button data export.”

Trapani went on to explain the importance of having a Twitter backup, since Twitter only saves your most recent 3,200 tweets. By the same token, Trapani advocated a a Flickr backup since the photosharing service only your most recent 200 photos unless and until you activate a Flickr Pro account. While LinkedIn hasn’t opened up their API yet to allow third party services such as Backupify to extract user content for backup, Trapani encouraged LinkedIn to get with program. Backupify will offer LinkedIn archiving and protection as soon as an adequate API becomes available.

Trapani’s full Fast Company article on how to back up your social life is available here.

@jaygarmon Email is the currency of all social media accounts. It’s the digital glue. #contentlou

@robmay opinion piece on Data Liberationhttp://www.technewsworld.com/story/70844.html

@ibackupyourshit don’t let’yo data die all locked up in the cloud.. setting up backupify would make yo’mamma proud

@kristinedziadul @backupifiers good to hear! Orlando has enjoyed the backupify presence but we look forward to being back with the WHQ brain power

@iamashok Excited to be more involved with @backupify from today, fun times ahead! #502toEC2

@bengreene The new @oneforty homepage is great! Absolute one-stop shop for getting the best value out of Twitter.

@vikchadha Backupify Secures $4.5 Million In a Series A Financing Round http://lnkd.in/JRut26

@ignat Twitter just suggested me to follow myself.

You can also follow @backupify on Twitter for more updates and tech news!