What Is Your Social Networking Policy?
One of the areas we’re asking enterprise IT executives about for our upcoming benchmark on unified communications and collaboration is organizational policies around the use of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Not surprisingly, we’ve seen a huge variance in responses.
Small companies, those in technology verticals, and educational institutions tend to be the most open, often not just allowing the use of public social networking sites, but actually encouraging it. Many universities that I’ve spoken with are extensively using Facebook for organizing class activities. Business schools are requiring students to leverage services such as LinkedIn to explore professional social networking opportunities.
In more traditional companies we are typically seeing a split, with marketing and customer support groups often embracing social networking tools to create a community for their products and services, while restricting access by employees in other groups.
This has created a bit of a backlash as IT executives continue to struggle to define legitimate uses for these services. We’re seeing a growing generational gap as recent college grads find that the tools they use to communicate with colleagues build social and professional relationships are often blocked by their IT departments. Users are increasingly finding legitimate reasons to leverage sites such as Facebook to participate in discussions in topics related to their on-the-job activities. And of course, there’s the on-going conflict between data protection requirements and the ability to allow individuals to participate in open discussions.
The challenge in defining acceptable use policies continues to grow as social networking services expand. Enterprises would be wise to understand the potential benefits to their organization from employee participation in such services rather than simply blocking any and all use.
Posted in: Social Networking.
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May 12th, 2008 at 5:20 am
We don’t allow any social networking sites. Managements figures it would allow too much time wasting idle chat.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:58 am
“continue to struggle to define legitimate uses” - because there are few benefits to the organization, only the individual.
If its that important to these new grads, then let them access these sites on their own time. Then, we’ll see how much time they devote to surfing them and what they really think of the value.
Its called self improvement and its done on your own time.
There’s too much opportunity for goofing off.
May 12th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Yes, indeed. We are having to do a complete about face or re-think in terms of these new paradigms of communication.
Having grown up in what I like to term two-dimensioned (traditional) marketing and advertizing, it is interesting to see oldies in the game wrestling to break out of the old mold and get into the three-dimensioned world of the Internet.
Early transitions from the 2D world to the 3D world were done by simply emulating posters, fliers and what have you on the web and then working to get exposure through search engines, popup ads and so on.
While this has limited workability, I’d say that anyone that doesn’t make the quantum leaped to embrace the web fully in all its dimensions is doomed.
We used to talk about “positioning” which is the way you make something more real by comparing it in some way to something familiar as in the now famous (well, in marleting circles anyway) Avis positioning against Hertz slogan “We may be second-best …”
Now, the game is to position oneself against the cpmpetition not only by such comparisons, but also within the communication channels that have opened up through the Internet.
Social Networking, actually “networking” in general, is here to stay and we have to embrace it and learn to think with it or lose out in the process of “natural selection.”
It’s not just a matter of policy, it’s a matter of survival in the modern world.