Businesses Struggle To Control Social Networking

Lucas123 writes "Businesses in highly regulated industries are trying to strike a balance between workers who use social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to communicate, and trying to satisfy federal requirements to monitor, capture, and audit all forms of electronic communications. As with instant messaging a decade ago, corporations are first blocking all access to the applications, and then considering what tools may be available to control them in the future. A cottage industry is being built around software that can not only control access to social networking websites but also ensure conversations over those websites can be stored for electronic discovery purposes."

Comments

HTTP over SOCKS over SSH over SSL thankyouverymuch

[Gothmolly]

Websense can suck it.

Department of Defense is struggling with this also

[Message]

The DoD has been struggling with this same issues as well, they recently issued guidance that opened up social media on their networks.

http://socialmedia.defense.gov/index.php/2010/02/26/dod-official-policy-on-newsocial-media/

Re:WTF?!?

[MozeeToby]

There's rules about what financial advisers can and can't advertise with. Basically, everything they put out to the customers usually has to be put through their broker dealer's compliance department. "Offering the same warning they did more than a decade ago" just means reminding them that if you're using Facebook or Twitter to communicate with your clients you better be putting it through compliance first.

Re:Why not block them entirely?

[bennomatic]

Disclaimer: This management method looks like it would be a bitch to scale.

Good point; it may be worth considering that if your company is so big that treating people like human beings doesn't scale, it's time to break up into smaller, more manageable units.

I read somewhere that 3M Corp actually does that, breaking off independent business units for each product line. As soon as a particular unit gets to be above 300 people, they figure, they can safely be split in two. If one of the two parts can't survive on its own, they let it die, as it was probably a drain on the bottom line anyway.