Businesses have been urged to put policies and
technologies in place to minimise the risk of staff damaging the
company's reputation onsocial networking sites.
In a
cross-industry
survey of 472 executives by the Economist Intelligence Unit for
professional services firm KPMG, fewer than 50% said they had
policies against unauthorised access to Web 2.0 sites, and only 28%
had included Web 2.0 in their risk management process.
KPMG has used Web 2.0 site
Second Life to recruit staff, but Crispin O'Brien, chairman of
technology at the firm, warned that access to such sites should be
controlled. "Businesses need to assess the benefit of having a
company group on Facebook," he said.
KPMG advised IT directors to ensure the human resources
department creates policy documents on Web 2.0 usage. Firms should
also use software to monitor where the company name was appearing
on the internet.
One IT director in a manufacturing company said, "I keep an eye
on Facebook to make sure no one is posting damaging stuff. In the
same way I periodically do targeted blog and livejournal searches,
looking for anything that we would not want out there."
The Trades Union Congress published a
briefing paper on the use of social networking sites in July
last year, which said many companies were ignoring the issue. "They
will only work out their response when faced with the first
problem, and they are having to take drastic action that could have
been avoided by early intervention," it said.
The KPMG/EIU survey found that more than 50% of executives felt
that protecting and securing critical data was the main barrier to
adopting Web 2.0 technologies, and 33% said not knowing how to
measure the impact of the technologies was the most serious
challenge to implementing them more broadly across their
company.