Categorizing the Business Risks of Social Media

This paper examines the risks arising from the business use of social media and develops a framework for describing and categorizing social media business risks. Using descriptive and axial coding methods an analysis of the academic and professional literatures on social media identified thirty risk types that were grouped into five risk categories. The coding and analysis process revealed further dimensions and issues for social media risk management, including the need to consider the evolutionary nature of risk classification, the existence of risk chains and interdependencies between risks. These are discussed in the context of future work on risk assessment and risk governance.