Are Facebook and Linkedin more trouble than they're worth?

There’s only one way to find out: risk assessment.

"‘The big challenge facing companies that embrace social media sites is the protection of their intellectual property," says Mitchell Feldman, sales and marketing director of The Internet Group. Historically, he explains, companies have invested in systems that protect them from data leakage. This could be anything from activity recording, print monitoring, email archiving right through to key logging.

There’s a problem though. Enterprises are discovering a new enemy. Worse still, it’s one they’d originally imagined was their friend. In The Art of War, generals are advised, keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. But somehow, this doesn’t seem right.

Feldman explains how companies have lost the plot. “Sites like Linkedin are great for business and most business owners encourage their client facing staff to interact with their clients and prospects through this medium,” he says. It has caught on because it is regarded as socially acceptable and less intrusive than a direct email.

But increasingly often, when a staff member leaves a company, they leave with their Linkedin account and full access to the clients they had worked with. This means they no longer have to try and steal client databases. ‘They have their own online and legal version of your client database already,’ says Feldman.

Typically, when people leave companies they do not update their working status, says Feldman. So they claim they still work for The Hambleton Group, and then approach the clients under this guise. Poor old Hambleton is left powerless as he doesn’t own the Linkedin account. “Linkedin needs to have a feature so the owner of the business can update a users record by saying ‘no longer employed’,” says Feldman. “This would make life much fairer for the employer and make Linkedin more accurate.”

Sites like Facebook where companies have fan pages are typically populated with clients and partners alike. This is a potential opportunity for a previous employee or even a competitor to attack their client base. Clearly this is highly undesirable to any company.

The third problem is keeping all these social sites up to date. It is now a full time job for larger firms to keep these well administered.
Feldman says user leaving forms now need to be updated with the following items:
Remove user from Facebook Group
Remove user from Linkedin Group
Remove users as follower of Twitter

“Social media sites are great but need to be treated with absolute care or they will come back and bite you!” he says.

Social media is a gift. But to paraphrase the advice given by the Trojans: beware geeks bearing gifts.