I have sat in endless conferences where the relative merits of brand immersion in social media is discussed. Occasionally someone points out the dangers and brings a healthy edge of sobriety to the conversation but usually its just blue-sky projections about how many happy customers will become your friend on Facebook or follow you on Twitter.

I have occasionally had melt-downs where I suggested that some brands should not enter social media, or that perhaps the risks outweigh the benefits. This really makes the conference crowd twitch. In my opinion the biggest danger exists for big brands that provide services, banks, insurance, telcos, broadcasters, airlines.

This risk only becomes real once a social media product shifts from being an early-adopter platform to a mass-audience one. Twitter has just shifted from the one profile to another and what comes with that shift is a severe change in the brand threat level. Culturally the early-adopters tend to be an elite that are predominantly driven by rational causes and tend to be aware of the consequences of their actions in the broader political and legal framework that they are operating in. When the rest of the population embrace something like Twitter then the rules change. One can no longer rely on the circumspection of users when it comes to trying to kamikaze a brand for personal and often unpredictable reasons.

You can see this change in danger density immediately if you compare the tone and nature of comments on blogs on the web to comments and discussions that happen in the mobile internet environment, as an example. The mobile internet is a mass-audience environment and people tend to be less cognizant of the legal implications of what they say and do, of the fact that other’s can see what they are saying, that they can be traced and held accountable or that their boss or someone significant in their lives may well come across their trail and see what they are doing. In a way it seems that the more people use a system the less conscious they seem to appear about the transparency of the system. On a level it must be the same instinct that gives us a sense of safety in numbers but it is certainly a false sense of security.

And so this brings me to my point – someone, most probably a disgruntled account holder, is trying to embarrass Standard Bank by squatting on a few Twitter accounts and posting stuff like “friends don’t let friends bank at Standard Bank !” and other kinds of malarkey. So what, I guess, its just Twitter.

Except that this little incident is probably wasting the time of a whole team of people who are trying to get to the bottom of it, stop it and help the rest of the audience understand its not real. If its not managed properly at Standard Bank its probably going to put them back 3 years in terms of management buy-in for social media campaigns and presence. Its also going to send every other big corporate social media team into a flat-spin (as it should) and in general its going to make a few more people nod in conferences when someone points out the odd chance that some psycho might jack your brand and burn you on the ether.

Like it or hate it, this is what we signed up for when the technologists decided everyone needs the maximum publishing power.