It’s not something that small business owners give thought to: But how are you affected if the one person with access to your business’ most critical online accounts – your company’s social media accounts, online bank accounts and cloud-based payroll software – dies unexpectedly? Will you be able to access those accounts? You better, if not your business is likely to be in for some financial pain.

A big issue

The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted this issue on its Web site. It may not seem like an issue that your business will suffer. But if your business does have online accounts that only one person has access, you could be tempting fate. In the event that person dies, are you able to access your online bank account in order to pay your vendors or cut a rent check to your landlord? How about your payroll software? Will you be able to cut checks to your employees, most of whom want to get paid on their regular payday? And then there’s Twitter and Facebook. If your business relies on these tools to talk with customers, you’ll need to know the passwords that give you access.

A trust issue

The Wall Street Journal story points to a larger issue: Many business owners erroneously think that once they store their files and records in the cloud, these documents and folders are safe. The truth is, they’re not. Hackers can still target them. And if no one can access this information because a key employee has died? Then you and your business are really in trouble.

Solutions

The easiest fix would be to be sure that more than one employee knows the passwords that go along with your online business accounts. You can also generate a list of these passwords and store it somewhere secure, such as safe. Secondly, make sure that your business’ online accounts aren’t registered to just a single employee. Some companies – such as Yahoo! – state that ownership of an account ends when the account holder dies. You don’t want to get in a tricky legal situation. Instead, make sure that several employees – and, obviously, yourself – have legal access to your business’ key online accounts.

Are you burned out on social media? Then you will not be thrilled to hear that a new social media site is gaining traction. However, you might be interested to know that this new site, Pinterest, doesn’t focus on the minutiae of day-to-day living as sites such as Twitter and Facebook seem to. Instead, Pinterest encourages users to talk about their interests with other people. And in this way, at least, Pinterest does more to encourage creativity among its users than sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

The site’s name gives a clue as to what it’s all about: Pinterest is a combination of “pin,” as in pinboards, and “interest,” as in what you are all about. When you sign up for Pinterest, you make your own “pinboards” or categories. You then attach photos and pictures that fit within those categories, as if you were pinning these images onto a bulletin board.

Creating Pinterest Categories

With Pinterest you can create different categories, like business and fashion, then pin images to each category and make notes about the images along with links to the website you found them on. You can then decide to share all of your pinboards or only a couple with other Pinterest users.

The Social Part of Pinterest

Just like Facebook and Twitter, you can elect to follow coworkers and friends. You don’t have to follow all of a friend’s collections; for instance, you can decide to follow only their collection of art, while choosing not to follow the restaurants they enjoy in their area.

Joining Pinterest

The one challenge with Pinterest is that you have to get invited to obtain an account. You can visit pinterest.com and request an invitation but it may be a while before you receive one. The more surefire strategy to get an invitation is to have a friend invite you that already posseses an account.