Twitter hacks drive social media managers to action

Regardless of the culprits, big brands certainly want to be sure they’re not the next victims of an attack.

“We genuinely empathize with the brands that suffered attacks on Twitter this week,” says Scott Monty, Ford Motor Co.’s global head of social media. “It’s the last thing that any company wants to have happen.”

What are those brands doing to prevent a hack? Some are staying tight-lipped in the name of not giving anything away to potential attackers.

“What went down certainly makes us re-examine our security, and I’ll leave it at that,” says Brooks Thomas, communications specialist at Southwest Airlines.

However, a few brand social media managers, along with PR pros who handle social media for clients, offered some of their strategies.

Passwords, passwords, passwords

“Our protocol at Ford was to ask our global teams to change all of their Twitter passwords immediately to more secure combinations of letters numbers and symbols,” Monty says. “Further, we’re asking them to create a regular update with passwords, along the same lines of the protocol that our IT organization requires of Ford employees for internal access to Ford sites and hardware. “