Social Media Networking
Navigating the social media minefield
By Aedan Kernan, a freelance journalist specializing in business relationships and environmental issues.
Aedan Kernan takes a look at what the rise of social networking sites means for our companies and how safe these sites are.
During June 2009 Facebook had 340 million unique visitors to its site—24 million more unique visitors than in May. The number of unique visitors had grown by 157 percent—or more than 200 million—in a year. Facebook now has more than 250 million active registered users.
Do these social networks add anything more than emotional richness to our lives? The level of communication on social networks is rarely very profound. A tweet that informs you an acquaintance is “walking the dog” is usually more valued by the sender than the receiver.
In a survey of US office workers carried out by Nucleus Research earlier this year, 47 percent of the 237 respondents said that they accessed Facebook during working hours (6 percent accessed Facebook only during working hours!). The average employee accessed Facebook for 15 minutes a day. The longest reported time on Facebook was two hours a day. Of those who used Facebook at work, 87 percent could not define a clear business reason for accessing the site.
The safety issues
Because Facebook is not monitored by most organizations, nor managed as closely as email, there are opportunities for Facebook users to circumvent controls and violate corporate communications policies through the site, according to the Nucleus study.
You can easily create security risks unknowingly by using Facebook. An English investigative team created a Facebook application that extracted users’ personal details such as their name, home town, school, interests and a photograph, and emailed them to a third party. Then it went and collected the same information from the user’s Facebook friends.
While Facebook works hard to spot these kinds of fraudsters, Facebook applications are stored on non-Facebook servers, so they have limited control. The investigative team concluded that the only way to completely protect yourself from applications skimming information about you and your friends is to erase all the applications on your profile and opt not to use any applications in the future.
Phishing attacks on social networking sites increased 241 percent during the first quarter of 2009, compared to 2008, according to MarkMonitor’s Brandjacking Index. Phishers seek to use emails that appear to come from someone you trust in order to gain confidential information from you. The good news is that social networks are relatively quick to shut down phishing attacks.
As social networking grows, it is likely that more people with underhand motives will seek to exploit it for illegal gain.
Déjà vu
Some employers will surely scream ‘ban it!’ But haven’t we been here before? Weren’t research organizations releasing exactly the same kinds of stories of lost productivity, security loopholes and threats to commercial confidentiality when the internet first became a business tool ten years ago?
That is not to say that companies should rush out and set up their own social networking businesses. It’s a roller-coaster business. British television company ITV purchased the Friends Reunited network for £175 million in 2005 and sold it for just £25 million in 2009.
Dan Martin, editor of Businesszone.co.uk, sees four areas where businesses can make money from social networking. Firstly, the recommendations from other social networkers can accelerate the trust-building that is necessary before a sale. It’s also a new channel to market the company and a way to find potential new employees and to learn something about them. (Companies such as Ernst & Young and T-Mobile are already using network information to find new employees.)
Finally, Martin believes that the feedback—negative or positive—that companies receive on social networking sites is information for continual improvement.
Spot the pattern
Not all social networking sites are dedicated to revealing cringingly personal information to the world. It can be fascinating to study the patterns of relations across professional networks on sites devoted to work lives—such as LinkedIn.
Before a conference or event, giving attendees access to each other’s LinkedIn or Facebook profiles can enable them to gain maximum value from the contacts they make. They may also feel very good about the company that creates the opportunity.
The patterns of contacts, made visible by social-networking software, have certainly caught the attention of the ‘data-mining’ community—analysts who search for commercial benefit from transaction data. Data-mining specialists KXEN have created an analysis tool called KSN. Traditionally, KXEN provided tools that could pick out and group individuals with similar buying patterns using the data collected from their money transfers or their use of loyalty cards. Now that same kind of analysis will be applied to social networking.
“KSN has been designed to help companies better characterize their customer connections and communities (this is to say, better understand and improve their customer knowledge), and thus better anticipate behaviors,” explains KXEN’s Christophe Guyot.
“Typically, social-network analysis perfectly squares with telecommunication companies. These companies already have tons of social data—years of transactional information on, basically, “who is calling who”, “how many SMSs did X send to Y”, “how did the churn behaviour spread out over this whole micro-community…” The underlying idea is to detect an influencer; someone that is worth treating very well and contacting prior to anyone else.
“In combination with our scoring engine, KSN helps improve marketing messages with greater accuracy and better choices, thanks to this addition of social information. Thus, you contact the right guy (and especially the influencers) with the right message, at the right time.”
Here to stay
Social networking is here to stay, argues Branding Expert, Dan Gershensen. “You can ban tools like Twitter and Facebook, but you can’t ban an entire medium. Instead of fighting these tools, companies can use their time more wisely by leveraging social media to their advantage. Form a Social Media Team to help create a company policy. Have regular brainstorming meetings about how staff members can better focus content around company goals so that blogs, tweets and posts are with a purpose, not just open-ended socializing.”