In his January 2014 Computing article ‘Corporate Risks from Social Media’, Brian M Gaff highlighted several risks related to the use of Social Media in the workplace. While Brian encouraged organizations to leverage the benefits of social media, he suggested that they should be vigilant in establishing internal controls policies and policing.
His explanation of the legal issues or penalties I could face if my social media site was hacked and customer data was compromised was of great concern to me. Therefore, I looked into the topic a little more and I summarized my findings:
- as an inforgraphic on social media use and monitoring in the workplace (Figure 1) and
- as a table on social media monitoring tools (Table 1 & Figure 2).
My conclusion after the investigation is
- social media use is accepted in the workplace,
- the negative consequences (for me) are marginal, and
- there are enough monitoring tools available to track and manage the risks.
References
Gaff, B. M. (2014). Computing and the Law: Corporate Risks from Social Media. Computing Now.
Institute, P. (2011). Global Survey on Social Media Risks: Suvey of IT & IT Security Practitioners.
Figure 1: Social media use and monitoring in the workplace
Figure 2: Treemap of Social media monitoring tools
Table 1: Social media monitoring tools
| Topics | Products | |
| 1 | Finding people to follow | Commun.it |
| Followerwork | ||
| 2 | Get alerts when you are mentioned on the web | GoogleAlerts |
| socialmention | ||
| 3 | Conversation Tracker | Conversion suite (Google Analytics) |
| Social Revenue (Argyle Social) | ||
| 4 | Identify influence | Google Analytics (Social Reports) |
| Google+ Ripples | ||
| hubspot | ||
| Klout | ||
| PeerIndex | ||
| sproutsocial | ||
| sumall | ||
| 5 | Schedule tweet/automaion | Buffer |
| Tweetlater | ||
| Twiller | ||
| 6 | See incoming posts in a workflow | Attensity |
| close | ||
| Jugnoo | ||
| Nimble | ||
| Sprout CRM | ||
| Conversation Center (SAS) | ||
| 7 | See all social media accounts | Angorapulse |
| Hootsuite | ||
| Tweetdeck | ||
| 8 | Tracking clicks on links that you sent | Backtweets |
| Bit.ly | ||
| 9 | Get information on how posts travel | Google Analytics |
| Hub Spot | ||
| Map my followers | ||
| sproutsocial | ||
| Tweet Reach | ||
| 10 | Controlling outbound tweeks | Crowd control |
| 11 | All (or many) in one | Beevolve |
| Google Analytics | ||
| Gorkana | ||
| Hootsuite | ||
| Radion6 | ||
| Tweetdeck | ||
| Viralheat | ||
| Social Media Analytics (SAS) |
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