Discussion on:

10 reasons NOT to block social networking at work

I had trouble determining how I wanted to answer that second poll question. Do I think companies have the right to block access? Yes. Do I think that, in most cases, the benefits of allowing access, such as they are, would outweigh the risks? Absolutely. Do I think that blocking access (or allowing it, for that matter) is a moral issue? No, I don't. Were you really trying to determine right vs. wrong with this question?

Actually, Jack's not responsible for the poll questions, that was me -- I thought it would be interesting to see how many members work for organizations that block access to social networking sites -- and then I thought this might be a good place to let people speak for or against that practice. Not a moral determination at all, just opinions. There are almost always nuances and situational considerations that make poll questions seem too inflexible -- but this poll is meant to be just an informal way to see how feelings are trending on the issue. I'm glad you used this thread to qualify your viewpoint, because this is where the real discussion can happen.
--Jody

While I was tempted to address multiple points, this is the one that really got my attention. I don't see how simply granting access will provide those skills. My Twitter experiences have shown that I haven't been able to get any value out of the service on my own. The web is full of anecdotal evidence of people regretting the personal information they inadvertently exposed on the web. Do you want them to use the same untrained behaviors in the company's name, with company information? Without training, those users could be more dangerous than helpful.

The early poll results indicate I'm in the minority, but I still view social networking as business tools primarily for the HR and Marketing departments only. Most of the other advantages Jack mentions can be handled in house, on this side of the firewall.

Thanks for your post Charlie. You took the words right out of my...well, keyboard I guess!

Seriously, anyone who has spent any amount of time on social networking sites reading the posts of many young people would recognize the misspellings, lack of proper capitalization and/or punctuation, and SMS text message slang being used in place of actual words.

If the argument is that I need to allow young people to have access to social media while they are working at my business in order to improve their morale, I simply could not disagree any more strongly.

The problem, in part, is that the younger generation has grown up with social media and text messaging as their primary forms of communicating with their friends. Many have difficulty with even basic email communication as they lack the spelling and vocabulary skills required in business.

I don't feel like they need better morale at work - they need a stronger work ethic! Perhaps in my generation socializing with my friends didn't take place via electronic media that could reach me anywhere at any time. Nevertheless, my employers made it clear that while at work I was expected to work - not socialize! We always had strict policies regarding the personal use of business email or telephones. We were allowed to make personal calls using our cell phones on breaks or we could use phones provided in employee lounge areas, but not at our desks while working. No one seemed to think that type of restriction was improper or negatively impacted "morale".

If being a "cool" employer means that I will allow my employees to do whatever they want whenever they want to do it, then I am absolutely NOT cool! Policies need to be in place that allow the employer to make sure that employees are doing the work they are being paid for.

I also have firewall security to protect my IT infrastructure and my company's proprietary information. My employees are trained to not share proprietary information unless it is on a need-to-know-basis to get their jobs done. Allowing the use of social networking in the workplace simply makes it too easy to allow a stupid remark to be posted online that may not have been shared otherwise.

Our company takes the stance that marketing and HR "require" access to social networking sites. I believe even that is a stretch. I keep hearing how it's a great "recruiting" tool. Have we hired anyone from FB? Not to my knowledge.

How often do you guys follow content streams from commercial entities? Maybe special interest stuff, but are you a "fan" of Pepsi Co? Come on, it's more a blatant attempt to be hip.. which is more sad than trendy.

Some very good points in this thread, but we can't deny the success at Pizza Hut and Dominoes had with marketing and PR. Let's learn to use them and address the concerns pointed-out above.

wonder about how sad the lives of the people on FB that make the pizza company use of the system are.

I can't seem to grasp how allowing my clerk in accounts payable to access Facebook will make her work harder or better. Especially when time sensitive tasks are at hand.
Time management isn't one of her stronger traits and social networking would certainly distract her during office hours.
Breaks and lunchtime - have at it, but not on the clock!

I definitely think that it depends on the work environment. If you have a job that doesn't require you to be up to date and current with events and news then I would say social media should be limited to the lunchbreak. If you live and work in technology you know that staying up with the most current trends and information is a critical part of the job. I remember my boss saying to me, "you have to consider the place we work" social media is an important way to stay connected.

"Social Media" sites are a malware/identity-theft/reputation-destruction super-highway. Allow access from company systems at your own peril.

allow those same employees to spend all day "around the water cooler"?
How about leaving and hanging out at the local coffee shop to "socialize"?
Social networking via Facebook, Twitter, whatever-comes-next should be
on the employee time, not time I'm paying for!
Allowances can be made for emergencies and such, but too many times
"work" is ignored while that all-important text message MUST be replied to
immediately!

Long before these silly sites, I was examining the progress of a project that was running behind schedule (by 18 months). They were only putting TAG spreadsheet data into a database for maintenance scheduling. I and two other people scrapped what had been done and started from scratch. In six weeks the maintenance program was on board the Oil Rig and being used by the engineers. What has this to do with social networking? Well when the computers they were using were examined they had over 10,000 number plates entries and were doing a bit of business on the side. None of those caught out raised one objection by quietly slithered away hoping their reputation would not follow them. Your item 10; I do not agree with an employee should not be giving any company information to employees of other companies. (You want your employees to know what other companies are doing and to be in touch with the heartbeat of your market. What better way to accomplish this than with social networking? Yes, they can network with email, but not on as grand a scale). I think it is obvious you have not been in any business that holds trade secrets that have been developed in-house, otherwise you would been singing from another songsheet. I don't often find myself hostile to most of what you write, but in this instance I would stay "stick to what you know." Don't change your day job!

Not all solutions, policies or 'freedoms' will suit all. I wouldn't want a bulldozer driver being distracted by IM conversations. However - employers sometimes forget that worktime is also the employee's time and that they have chosen to be there. As the social space expands employers that do not actively hobble their staff will be more sought after and the workers will be happier. Benefits will flow - maybe not immediately enough for some 'Bosses' - and my workplace is a practical example of that. I won't go into specifics but the place I choose to work for realised the benefits of having a 'social savvy' workforce about a year ago. To the point of now actively initiating staff seminars to educate the old duffers like me! Not bad for an old school company 50 years old.

Practical benefits have been re-establishing contacts with good past workers and recapturing their training and skills. Well, those that can use the social pages... the time that an employer begrudges for networking will bite them. Our younger staff know that work has to be completed and stay back to do so. For free, out of respect. The odd out-of-hours emergency has been promptly dealt with adding to kudos for the business. That is worth $$$ for tolerating the odd daily FB message. Those that 'get it' will survive the new competitive more easily.

I could argue real life points against almost all the statements in the article. I've seen social media be a place for workers to trash their boss or co-workers b/c they are having a bad day. Totally unacceptable. If you want damaging marketing that will hurt a company's image - this is the way to do it.

If anything, allow workers to do their "social thing" on their breaks only. FaceBooking through the day or sending tweets is a distraction and I've seen it have a negative impact on workplace productivity.

Also, txting is tricky as many parents have to stay in touch with babysitters, their kids etc. and in today's world that is important - I understand. But it should not be used for much else.

Unless it's their job to use social media tools, then you don't have to worry about whether they are social savvy or not. If it's part of their job then that's another story and guidelines should be set and reinforced.

Being a healthcare provider we dont have advertising, marketing etc so why would I ever want to give my staff a "tool" which diverts them from my business. Bewteen 8 and 5 its my dollar they are spending and I choose NOT to spend it on "Social Network" sites.
It seems to me that most of the proponents of this "must have" viewpoint are so far removed from the real world of public and private business that they have no idea of what it is like to run all or a part of a business. Lets face it we are (most of the world anyway) still in recessionary times and jobs are not plentiful so I dont even need to contemplate this to attract good applicants. If you think that sounds mercenary - it isnt - its just good business.

Facebook is the "source of all evil" on the internet. All of the cute little add-ons that people add to their pages are rife with malicious code. To suggest that a business open their network to that kind of vulnerability is naive and irresponsible!

There is NO NEED for FB or any of these other distracting sites to be accessed from company computers period!! The work the company deals will never require any use of these sites!!!

My opinion is that unless your are in a business that requires access to these various sites then NOT ON COMPANY EQUIPMENT or TIME ($$$). If it were possible I would jam employees phones (iphones,BB,etc.) from accessing these sites when within the walls of the office! If your on FB on your iphone,BB then you are not working when on the clock!!!!

Really, if you have to force people to do work, then you'll have them trying to avoid work at every opportunity. Relaxing the oppressive company attitude and treating employees like they are people with lives and trusting them to get work done enables them to get more done and be happy about doing work.

Made me push the button 5 times today. My Finger is worn out and I'll be unable to use it for weeks now.

A line from Gorge Jettison who's sole job was to push a button when the system needed reseting at Spacely Space Sprockets or whatever it was called.

I don't currently know of any business other than Government Departments maybe that can afford to pay people to Goof Off all day and never do any work. Private Enterprise unlike Government Departments do not owe their workers a living or even a nice place to work they require work to be done and caring a bit of paper round all day does not qualify as Work unless you are on the Board of Directors and even they demand that the work gets done.

Once upon a Time before Computers they employed a Typing Pool which had lots of young girls who did the typing. They where replaced with 1 worker and a computer, Personally I can not see any business going back tot he days of the Typing Pool and expecting them to place expensive equipment and even more expensive Internet to every worker to pay them to Goof Off all day is only something that an Idiot would think is desirable.

Col

You just might, with suitable posted notice, be able to jam cellphone use within your office space. After all, any true emergency can be handled through the office's main number. Its been that way for decades and worked very well.

The FCC has issued very few jamming exceptions. Not even federal prisons can get jamming permission, even to block prisoners from conducting criminal activities on cell phones they're prohibited from having in the first place.

what was essentially a Faraday Cage as the external walls and roof. I know it's been done for certain Dept of Defence facilities and DoD research units in the US as we got the plans for such from the US DoD a couple of decades back.

That's what the prisons want to do, and they can't get approval. I'm familiar with the types of facilities you describe, but the DOD or DOD-supporting research is about the only organizations that can get approval these days.

Movie theaters and other performance arenas would love to block calls. I favor clubbing phone-using theater patrons as if they were baby seals.

while this is just ensuring no signal gets in or out of your building and not producing a counter signal. Anyway, put enough steel in a building and the cells won't get through too well, so I doubt they could justify saying a passive system built in to the building constitutes jamming, but I'm not a US Fed dept bureaucrat.

They'd be prohibitively expensive anyway.

...what.. are you using your cell phone in a movie theater atm?

"Movie theaters and other performance arenas would love to block calls. I favor clubbing phone-using theater patrons as if they were baby seals." LOL... my wife and I use that reference often, which we've boiled down over the years to where all either of us need say is "bonk-bonk!" and the point has been made.

10 bonus points for anyone knowing the common cultural origin of our use of "bonk-bonk!"

Now I'll go one further: club anyone who's conversation is intelligible to anyone other than the 2 parties on the call...

As in, "Bonk, bonk on the head"? Are you a grup?

That's the one... the episode was entitled "Miri" I believe.

(btw not sure where this post will end up, yours doesn't have a reply link on it)

Maybe this is an exceptional company profile, but we deal with customer confidential and highly sensitive company confidential material on a daily basis. For security reasons alone, there's no way that I will allow access to these sorts of sites, any more then I allow access to hotmail, yahoo or any other non-corporate e-mail systems on the business network.

I've got a completely segregated network that does allow access to everything for general surfing, including facebook etc., but permitting access to social media from the users desktop on the secure business network. No way! Not in this environment.

We had a web appliance which was taken out to be upgraded. Unfortunately the new device proved to be a pain in the neck to configure and then kept locking up, and we got to the point where it had to go back to the maufacturer to be replaced. During this time we had to do without any content filtering. Absolute nightmare with employees diving onto SNsites all day and then complaining when I finally blocked them.

There are far too many abuses when you allow employees access to social networking.
Take for example a car dealer. The ladies and sales people get on social networking but the body shop mechanics aren't allowed equal time. This is blatant discrimination to say the least.

Why should any employer allow a typical employee to be paid to skylark or even malinger while on the employer's dime?

If I were a large employer I would most certainly block anything that had no direct relationship (in my SOLE opinion) to the employee's job.

People are desperate for a job so the 'cool' company theory is out the door. They goof off and steal time from the company then there are at least 1,000 others who would gladly take the job and NOT violate or abuse the company policy nor waste the employer's time.

You are paid to do your job, not promote anything. That job belongs to whomever the employer pays specifically to do that (marketing division and only things related to the company).

Playing online games or gossiping about your sex life or other non business communication should be grounds for immediate (INSTANT) termination.
Doing that is the exact same thing as stealing from the employer.

How many of you would be happy if your local public servant (police, fire, trash man, etc) decided to take off sick while getting paid for it and go shopping or golfing or whatever especially when you needed them to do their jobs??
That is an abuse of the system and theft from the employer.
The private sector is no different.

Typically women are the ones in the position to seriously abuse the internet with social networking since most of them are at a computer terminal.

Go ahead and allow them to use social networking and not allow others who do not have regular access to social networking to have the same time and access to the services and see if you don't open yourself up to lawsuits.

And you should definitely be taken to the cleaners for discrimination.

Best is to never allow an employee access to social networking unless your specific job entails ONLY social networking marketing and specific research.

The above list the author posted for this thread is absurd. They want to justify outright theft by trying to rationalize employee abuses of their job.

Only those whose jobs do not specifically require access to social networking will want that access. This is because they are dishonest and plain old thieves.

That's a thought. Stealing internet from your employer should land the employee in jail just as if they stole money out of the account or register. Stealing is stealing and it is wrong.

Forgot to mention that employers soon won't be allowed to demand their employee's facebook or other social networking passwords as a condition of employment. So the employee will have total privacy and the employer cannot protect themselves.

Simply this - block ALL internet access for regular employees. They don't need it to do their jobs.

SN sites are just another electronic version of water cooler time- wasters. Businesses in the past did just fine without these supposed "rights".
Time for a reality check.

1 - Referrals: Locating and retaining talent is typically paramount for any business and the best source of quality hires is via employee referrals... so the easiest way to do that is to have employees share your jobs via their social networks and refer their friends to your recruiters.

2 - Performance: if you hire professionals and treat them like school kids you deserve low morale and low performance. If your employees are performing their job and deliverying the results you expect in a professional way then who cares if they hang by the social water cooler more than you think they should.

Besides, most people have FB and Twitter, IM etc. on their mobile phones, are you going to collect them in a bucket when they show up for work?

The elephant in the room is mobile data devices, because employers cannot do a thing about them on a technical level. That means that employees' time management is a MANAGEMENT issue...if your staff isn't turning in the expected level of performance, what difference does it make where they're frittering away their time?

Second, the points about using SM for knowledge gathering and opportunities are quite valid. If you're in a business where you see no opportunity for growth or benefit from SM, then you're probably lacking in imagination for starters, but sure, put a clamp on it. However, if you're in one where you can identify ways to use SM tools for public communication, marketing, outreach, or other opportunities, then doesn't it make sense to have your employees be conversant in SM in a way that's acceptable to your organization? Don't you want to have a policy in place that guides your staff in business use of SM, that sets standards for communication, and that enables them to be good stewards and advocates for your organization?

Better to understand and manage it than to forbid it, in my opinion.

If employees can use their phones, why do I need to pay for network infrastructure to support their habits? No. You need your dose of celebrity gossip? Use your phone and pay for the MB you use wasting your time. Keep that crap off the production network.

what am I paying the recruiters for? If the only way an employee communicates with that 'friend' is via social network, does the employee really know that person well enough to recommend them?

As to mobile phones, we recently made it a policy violation to use them in many portions of the factory and warehouse. This applies to all employees who may pass through those areas, regardless of their position in the food chain. Maintenance department employees are exempt.

1 - Referrals: locating and retaining talent is good and, quite often, employee referrals are a great way to do that. However, if your employee is spending an excessive amount of time on SM and recommends others who do likewise, is this good? Do you really want more employees who spend their workday on FB/twitter, not working?

2 - Performance: if you hire professionals and they act like school kids then you deserve the reputation of being a company that doesn't produce and lacks innovation.

Yes, most have all the SM on their mobile phones, but setting professional standards of use and employee expectations sets a company apart as having an idea of what quality is vs. what's a day care center.

I think all the points are very valid.
I work in a corporate environment, have work in small business and even owned a few myself.
It is more about adequate management than over controlling adults. If the proper policies are in place, employees are educated and trained on all policies, have proper employer/employee communications and involvement, you have a higher morale and better commitment from the employee's also.
If the policy says no personal social media on company computers is a no no during specific or all times, for specific positions, etc, then is management issue to have a proper relationship with their employee's that they have the ability to lead and management that environment, if can't they are not a good manager, and in my experiences, many are not. Now there may be some positions that take special considerations, but over all just out right blocking is not the proper work environment for any access, except to block potentially harmful sites from malware, etc.
Except for having a policy that prevents discussions about an employer or work related content, no one has the right to barr anyone from being associated and using any media or saying what one wants without any repercussions in their private lives and/or on their own time using their own resources period.

I'm not really in agreement because a company wants to control the message sent to the outside world. Why don't expect all employees to have savvy marketing skills - why would we?

That said every employee will simply reach for their phone if it is not available on the desktop. Keeping it off the desktop merely prevents them from copy/paste.

Do you want your nurse or doctor to tweet "I can't believe Mr X tested positive for AIDS OMG!"? How about when the CIO and others in IT are sued and/or arrested for allowing nurses to update their Facebook when the patient monitors are left ignored? There are cases like that already because their organization thought one or more of the reasons in this article were valid. "Don't be a statistic" trumps all of the above rules.

Turn on, tune in, and drop out. And may God help us.

I block this stuff for a living and I don't remember the last time I was on a network and pulled flow from their internet connection and facebook, youtube, twitter & some other time waster wasn't on the top ten list of things being done on the network.

It's simple, if you want people to get their work done, then block the sites. If it creates a big backlash you can always do what I do... create a "party time" rule in the firewall and let them surf over their lunch hour. That way everyone wins.

Just my humble opinion.

I'm not going to launch a diatribe, just comment that I am amazed at the level of tyranny and lack of imagination that has been expressed here - thankfully balanced by some sane comment. For those that think that social media has no place in Healthcare: Can you show me a more cost effective way to get the word out about diabetes, smoking, alcohol abuse...etc etc?

Sure, it is conceivable that someone who works in a health practice could potentially tweet patient information - never have heard of it happening - but that is an issue of core professionalism and no technology can be blamed for that. This also applies to all other areas in work-life. Instead of blanket punishing every employee for abusing work time try making an example of just the perpetrators through withdrawing privileges and foster a responsible culture.

That's a great idea, but it should be handled by the community outreach employees or similar department. It shouldn't be in the hands of all employees, who may not know how to effectively phrase information so that it educates and doesn't scare.

The same applies to the public interactions of most companies.

Would you allow your clerks to spend 2 hours on the phone "socializing" in the name communication, networking, publicity, morale, reputation, etc.?
Of course not.
There is only 1 reason to allow social networking: business need. My salespeople legitimately have that need. The rest don't. Do they abuse it? Yes. But nothing's perfect.
Jack: Try MBWA (a LOT) in a centralized organization (i.e. an office) that allows social networking. You'll have a new opinion VERY quickly.

I used to work at a company that blocks almost everything. Internet mail was blocked, social media was blocked. We had our own IM service so employees and clients could send/receive business related messaging. But I also worked in a place where they blocked almost nothing. Employee activity is monitored, I was tasked to occasionally have a look at the logs. Generally there was a bit of Facebook, but not excessive. With around 1,000 employees well under a hundred messages. But that was only through our network. I could see a number of people typing into their phones in the break room.

Plenty of valid arguments here to keep SM off of corporate and SMB networks. The only problem is that you are fighting a tide of young people that have been raised with SM. It is the exact same thing as trying to keep tablets and iphones out of the enterprise.

Frankly, I would rather have employees use SM on the company computers than to have the same communications taking place on their own devices. The complete untethering that is created because they are using their own devices gives employees the feeling that they can post whatever they want to social media sites (the boss/company sucks, etc.) . I can monitor the network and then send monthly departmental (targeted at the offending department) reminders concerning the acceptable use of SM and the consequences of violating the acceptable use policies laid out in the 'employee handbook'.

Get used to it, it is the future. The day might come when employees choose an employer because they are "facebook and Twitter friendly". Remember the generation you will be dealing with. Even some of the Gen X crowd is dumb enough to post stuff like "the boss sucks" on their FB page. Imagine a younger generation that feels no need to modify the privacy settings on their SM apps, and looks at corporate data policies as intrusive and unwelcome.

Brave new world, friends.

You can't get away from the use of personal devices whether it's a tablet or smart phone and the access they give to the Internet, SM, games etc.

If someone is lazy or doesn't want to work they won't, either by playing on their iPad, BB etc. or drinking coffee, reading the paper or going to fictitious off site meetings. SM and mobile computing is not the root problem. Hire the right people in the first place including the line managers who should be addressing non performance of staff.

Our organisation has set up a forum where our s/w engineers can develop their own apps and deploy to staff via an app store style platform. The response has only been positive from both the engineers and staff that download the apps.

Not specific to SM but the point is we embrace new tech, behaviour and ways of working with the right level of controls for a corporate (e.g. Productivity, security etc.). It does motivate people and stimulates ideas and I'm working on a dedicated support service for this type of IT consumerisation. Again my management team are enthusiastically working on implementing this including coming up with a counter proposal resourced within the existing budget when the idea was nearly stopped due to financial pressures.

Rather than reject this type of thing out of hand I recommend evaluating it to make an informed decision on whether all or some of it can add value to your business whatever it is.

Hello Tomorrow!

Companies that block social sites make the false comparison of thinking if the employee were not on that site, then s/he would be doing actual work. The fact is that some employees actually work at work whereas others will spend their time on the social network or on-line perusing news sites or off-line reading the newspaper or off-line hanging at the coffee pot or just hanging out in other cubes annoying the folks who are trying to work.

Same deal with managers. Some do their job and others waste their time blaming the wrong things and dealing with the wrong issues.

This is one of those things which management needs to assess on a case-by-case basis. Like allowing employees to take 'extra' cigarette breaks, personal phone calls or go a few minutes extra at lunch, anything has the potential to affect the bottom line but employee morale has a huge value as well. Consider it as an advertising expense. We allow it here but there's a very clear 'social media' policy in place and, considering the alternatives, no employee in his or her right mind would argue that the policy is 'unfair'. Like previous writers have said, employees ARE being paid to work, and it's fine to monitor and adjust social media usage as necessary.

With modern security solutions, it is possible to fine-tune who can access what and how.

Allowing company-wide social network access could be a productivity threat, and this extends to using personal email services and other sites famous for everything except getting work done.
As I have once heard..."when your employees are browsing away, they are stealing time and productivity from the company, and that is a crime". Would you accept your staff to go outside and speak on the mobile to their friends for 5 minutes every 20 minutes?

The temptation to open that browser and get immersed within it will also affect internal communication: staff are there.....however they??re not "on".

The number one reason I hear from companies that have very sensitive client data is that they do not allow social networking because of the fear of an employee leaking out client data through Twitter, Facebook, etc. They are afraid that Mary Anne from Customer Service will take a photo and post it to her Facebook account to steal a clients identity.

Now Mary may be 67 years old but she is an avid Facebook user. She posts photos of her family, her pets, and even her art collection on Facebook daily. She always has scripture to quote daily for all her friends to see. However, don't let the perfect granny image fool you. She is secretly working with a network ring of hackers that steal people's identity and sell it for million of dollars each year. How else would could she afford a pre-owned 88' Buick LeSabre? It has dice hanging from the mirror so that right there is a dead give away.

Do companies have a legitimate worry about employees stealing clients data? If I did that, I rather not be known, work from an outside source, and try to hack my way in.

1 - leaking data - a data breach can cost large fines and loss of reputation. Some social networking sites have tortuous privacy settings that are continually changing. You talk of collaboration, but what if that is between two people dealing with sensitive information e.g. a person requiring care at home?

2 - malware - social networking is yet another entry point for malware. Made worse if you use HTTPS because that then bypasses UTM and other perimeter protection methods.

3 - reputation - feeling annoyed - well venting your frustrations immediately to social media is not going to enhance the reputation of you or your employer

4 - legal - social media is publishing, and thus liable to the laws of libel. Journalists are (or should be grounded) in at least the basic law around this; your average Facebook user is not.

5 - security - the more that is posted publicly, the more data can be joined up and build a picture of an organisation - thus aiding in social engineering attacks

... add 5 more of your own

I hear all the arguments about it being great for publicity, but unless social media is totally different, consider the adage that applied up to now - "one dissatisified person tells 10 others; a happy person tells one". Thus negative information grows 10x faster and propagates 10x wider than positive information. Certainly when I look at comments on news articles, negative comments usually outweigh the positive comments significantly except for the occasional good news story (a rarity anyway).

There are some business for which utilising social media to its fullest extent is a business benefit, but for many others, the risks outweigh the benefits.

Back in the mid 1980s (circa 1986) I experimented with using a BBS to post common responses to technical support issues. (BBS were probably the first social media). However, in less than a month, it became clear that a limited number of individuals were using it to post personal attacks and so it was shut down.

Social media is not the great panacea that will make all businesses greater

The comment I would make was already expressed nicely by LK04. For every positive point made by the author, there could (and often is) a negative side concerning social networking in places of business.

Who wouldn't want networking from employees and the opportunity to bring new customers. Nice idea, but I read dozens of stories about employee misuse of social networking in the workplace, and have personally seen (in IT field) people waste an entire 8 hour workday with things such as Facebook. In fairness, I have seen this behavior also with non-social networking websites - such as personnel wasting hours at a time on ebay.

People will likely learn all the aspects of social networking on their own, but if a company wants to invest a small amount of time training certain employees in SN - fine. But not to give all employees carte blanche to use it on a daily work basis. At this point in time, the negatives will outweigh any possible positives.

Before my employer clamped down on unfettered Internet access, we monitored usage and discovered to our horror that 68% of traffic was to on-line dating sites. Our workforce is mostly married. So absolutely nothing good would come from unfettered access -- affairs and divorces hurt productivity and morale.

All those points can be turned around by the same forces that you tout as reasons for allowing social media and turn it into a disaster.

Waste of time
Loss of company data
Loss of reputation
Legal issues
Poor morale

and so on....

The only good thing I can see is that you may get a jump on discovering bad actors so that you can deal with them.

I must say, I thought of the big companies like Apple (and even Google) when I heard "transparency". Like the transparent iPhone pre-launches? People might like transparency, but when you look at the numbers, Apple seems to be doing nicely "behind closed doors"...

There is a time for security, too, and personally I'd prefer if all the folks at the bank weren't downloading Facebook widgets or visiting potentially malicious short URLs from Twitter...

Should sales and marketing teams be using these means - yes, I think so - but not all employees during work hours on their work systems.

allow social networking. Everyone knows that networking and having all those "friends" is more important than having ability, loyalty, intelligence and a strong work ethic.

Sounds like the green light to mess around all day and not do any company related real work. If everyone did this in the name of marketing what a joke company you would be. Absolute waste of company time not to mention the security risk and words being being fixed in stone that could damage the company. Good try.

Many of my IT counterparts in my company and other organizations are the reason the company blocks many social networking sites. There are times when they behave like overzealous centurions and advise higher-ups to block these sites. Fortunately, some senior management types at work have requested to unblock the more popular sites.

I have found some organizations blocking cloud sites. I get messages from users at these places because they cannot access a file from my site (linked to a cloud service). Their IT geeks will unblock long enough for them to download the document then block it again. I think they confuse the cloud with bit torrents. Or maybe they're just control freaks.

Kidding, right? I have a young fellow working (ok, occasionally working) in my section who, out of an 8 hour day, might do 3 hours work. The rest of the time is spent on his phone updating facecrook. Personally, I'd like to install a signal jammer for mobiles here also. FB, ebay, twitter, etc are blocked at the server.