What company doesn’t have a Facebook page, a Twitter account or even a YouTube Channel? All of these can be great vehicles for conversing with customers and prospects and for building brands. They also offer easy platforms for those who want to sabotage your organization – current or former employees, disgruntled customers or people who simply want to tear down your company’s reputation.

Perhaps the most famous case was the YouTube video that showed employees at a Domino’s Pizza store in North Carolina doing some disgusting, explicit things in the kitchen. The openness of social media offers an easy ticket for social sabotage.

Your identity can be hijacked by a bogus Facebook profile. Comments posted in jest on a blog or in a Tweet could be easily be misunderstood to the detriment of your reputation. Or a disgrunted employee or customer could go on a profanity-laced tirade against you, your company or your product.

So what do you do when it happens to you?

1.   Monitor the social media space. There are online services that aggregate social media mentions of your company, people and products in real time — Technorati and Radian6, for example. Monitor those several times a day. Check your own Facebook pages, fan pages, blogs and YouTube Channels as well.

2. Delete offensive, explicit posts immediately and report them. If offensive material shows up on your Facebook page, delete it immediately and report the offender.  Each site has links to report fraudulent, offensive or abusive behavior. In the case of someone passing himself off as someone else, report it to the social media site immediately. You will likely have to block all posts from that profile until Facebook can remove the profile (and that’s a subject for another time).

3. In the case of false or explicit posts on another organization’s social media sites that are damaging to you or your business, contact the site owner and insist the offensive or false information be removed immediately. If necessary, contact your attorney. Libel laws provide the same protection to people defamed on blogs as they provide to people defamed by the New York Times.

Fixing social sabotage consumed Domino’s for weeks. The offending employees were fired and charged with felonies for adulterating food. Domino’s president posted a new video issuing a public apology for what happened and tried to reassure consumers that similar acts weren’t occurring at other Dominos stores. He also shut the restaurant down for several days and brought in a crew to sanitize it from top to bottom in full view of local TV cameras.