According to Baseline Magazine, LinkedIn was recently hacked, and over six million passwords were stolen. If you can’t log into your LinkedIn account, then it’s likely your account was hacked. In this official message, it’s clear that LinkedIn is restoring accounts and apologetic, but the issue here isn’t necessarily LinkedIn’s responsiveness to such a system compromise, but another reminder that online security is still a presumptive realm which many ecommerce merchants rarely bother to question.
For ecommerce merchants marketing product, or just networking on LinkedIn, a password breach could spell major trouble. On the light side, a LinkedIn account compromise means a huge delay in your daily posts and networking, and on the more serious side it could mean brand devastation–if someone pilfers the account and malevolently crash tests it through brand blocks years in the making.
In today’s online world, current wisdom says we should splinter the brand’s marketing campaign into however many portals it takes to reach an increasingly fragmented target market. Meet customers where they are, is what ecommerce merchants are told to do. However, doing so incrementally risks compromise each time a new third-party social media account is opened. And the worst part for brands who like full control over their image and product dissemination is that such a breach as LinkedIn experienced is beyond any brand’s control (beyond LinkedIn, of course).
In fact, to combat what many brands are seeing as insecure networks and a general feeling of social media marketing distraction fatigue, there are efforts to create proprietary social communities and forums directly at the store website level…especially when social media conversion is proving relatively low anyway.
How are you responding to the risks and rewards of being present on so many social media networks?
