The Upside and Downside of Social Media

By Michael Osterman
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Social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many others fill an important gap in electronic communication and information delivery: they allow the broadcast of information in ways not practical with email or other collaboration tools, while at the same time allowing a highly granular push and pull model of information delivery. These tools can be used to build a brand or a company’s reputation, monitor perceptions about a wide range of issues, disseminate information, demonstrate industry expertise, and build brand loyalty.  Social networking permits individual to share information and companies to gain competitive advantage in ways not practical or possible with other tools.

However, social networking tools used in a corporate context also pose an enormous liability on a number of fronts:

  • These tools make it incredibly easy for individuals to share confidential, sensitive or otherwise private information, both inadvertently and maliciously, potentially violating privacy or other laws.
  • Similarly, they make it easy for employees to post slanderous or libelous content about fellow employees, a company’s management, its clients and others.
  • They are another avenue through which business records can be created and—in the absence of good archiving tools—lost, leading to e-discovery, legal hold, evidence spoliation and other problems.
  • The absence of good security defenses that are devoted specifically to monitoring social networking protocols can offer hackers and other malicious types yet another means to introduce malware into an organization.

Social networking tools offer substantial benefits to individuals and organizations, but they must be managed properly. Decision makers must understand the risks and benefits from the use of social networking tools in general and also from the specific tools that might be of value. They must develop granular policies about their use and implement the means to enforce these policies. They must also implement the systems that will monitor, review, block and archive social networking content; all while ensuring that social networking can be used in as friction-free a manner as possible.

We are about to publish a white paper on social networking that will discuss the key issues that decision makers need to understand about how to benefit from the use of these tools, while at the same time protecting their organizations from harm.

Published July 12, 2010