Looking Closely On Social Networks
March 16th, 2010 Subscribe To Our Feed
The public and corporations both have concerns about social networks, though the concerns of each are a bit different. The biggest worry on the part of public individuals is the safety of their personal data, and whether they have to worry about identity theft. For companies who are busily doing business blogging and otherwise getting friendlier with customers, the worry is about how to maintain that more personal relationship without jeopardizing proprietary information.
The issue of personal information is a large concern indeed for social networking sites. In the same way that businesses recognize a potential gold mine in these networks, so do criminals, hackers and spammers. Spam, in fact, is probably the least of people’s worries. The networks themselves are scrambling to make their sites as secure as possible, to stop people’s personal information being hacked and stolen. And the general public needs to engage in social media education to learn just what sort of information to post online, and what they should keep off the net altogether.
Sophisticated hacking is a concern for businesses too. But they also must tailor their own social networks to strike the right balance with customers. They could swing too far and become overly chatty, or could remain where they have traditionally been, continuing to regard customers as passive receptors for advertising and merely a source of money. No customer will abide the latter attitude for long, so a corporate social media plan must stand somewhere between the two; to guard genuine secrets, yet still allow a conversation.
Some groups now talk about enforced policies for social media strategy, to help “police” the multitude of social networks and provide some protection. Businesses are setting up policies to govern what employees say online, even trying to limit what they say or do on their own time rather than company time. Yet trying to enforce overly restrictive policies will undoubtedly kill the very positive, immediate benefits of using social media in the first place. These are separate issues, of course, from the question of hacking and security, which affect companies as well as individuals. All of these issues demonstrate that social media today is still a very new thing, and everyone is taking awhile to find their place.
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