The title of a recent KPMG study, “A New Role for New Times: Opportunities and Obstacles for the Expanding Finance Function,” suggests that the finance function, like the universe, is expanding.

Recent developments inside (and outside) corporate brand management teams also indicate that the marketing function is currently exerting the strongest gravitational pull on corporate finance capabilities, especially in risk management.

The upshot? Get your finest risk management minds over to the marketing and brand teams as soon as possible.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the staggering time and money Bank of America spent in response to the brand risk that a WikiLeaks’ threat posed. Last week, Deloitte Principal Jonathan Copulsky told me that we haven’t seen anything yet in terms of the velocity, magnitude and persistence of brand risk in our highly connected, highly social mediated world.

“In the next two to three years, I predict that we will see more and more discussions about brand risk as a major concern,” says Copulsky, the author of “Brand Resilience: Managing Risk and Recovery in a High Speed World” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). “We will continue to see incidents [like those we’ve witnessed in recent months] as well as incidents that we can’t even imagine.”

Copulsky began our conversation by referring to how social media platforms helped topple governments in the Middle East earlier this year. His forecast made me wonder if we might see some combination of a WikiLeaks-esque revelation, social media mobilization and shoddy risk management topple a Fortune 500 company within the next 12 months.

So concludes the alarmist portion of this blog entry.

My point is that brand management requires much more rigorous and sustained risk management expertise than it has generally received in the past. Consider the value hit that Domino’s Pizza suffered two years ago when a couple of its risk-challenged employees posted a nasty prank video on YouTube.

The video was viewed some 450,000 in two days before it was yanked from the site. HCD Research conducted a survey of more than 200 U.S. consumers in the wake of the video crisis: 75 percent said they would have patronized a Domino’s before the video appeared. Only 25 percent said they would do the same after the video appeared.

Happily for Domino’s, that “would eat your pizza” measure increase to 44 percent after the company’s president posted a video apology on YouTube. Even more happily, the company subsequently leveraged social media in a more proactive way to enlist customer input for improving its pizza recipe. That campaign, Copulsky notes, is widely regarded as a success.

So, what can chief marketing officers, brand managers, chief risk officers and finance professionals with risk management expertise do to exert manage a brand that they have less and less control over with each subsequent blog post, YouTube video clip, Twitter campaign and one-star review?

They can start by working together. Next, they can develop more proven and systemic approaches to managing brand risk. This process, Copulsky explains, includes listening, calibrating and taking action. Companies should develop methods of monitoring comments, opinions and potential attacks on their brands.

And then they should differentiate among those inputs: Which comments and criticisms are likely to generate the greatest impact?

When a no-name cyclist on an opposing team tells a small cycling Web site that he thought Lance Armstrong used steroids in the late 1990s, Team Lance can quickly refute the allegation, discredit the source and move on. When a close friend and teammate goes on 60 Minutes with much more detailed allegations, that threat should be taken much more seriously.

Finally, companies should have actions teed up and ready to execute in response to different types and magnitudes of threats. This step (the product of scenario planning) may sound more familiar to finance and risk executives than it does to most marketing and brand folks.

Yet, some marketing experts are leading the way in injecting more risk-management capabilities into existing brand-management programs. Copulsky outlines some of these examples in his book.

Additionally, Burson-Marstellar unveiled its brand vulnerability index (BVI) about a year ago. The BVI, this informational page reports, “helps companies quantify brand risk; identify emerging risks, allowing pre-emptive engagement and mediation; and assess comparative risk against competitor brands. “

Burson may soon have updates to its BVI, which the global PR firm is no doubt putting through its paces as it deals with its own brand risk right now.