Is Social Media Jamming Your Network?

Socializing at work used to mean a trip to the watercooler, but today it can mean a traffic jam on your network. While many people, particularly in marketing and customer service roles, rely on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social networking applications to do their jobs, too much recreational use of social media can have an impact on your network and the availability of core business applications.

“While it varies from organization to organization, we have seen instances where as much of 60 percent or more of network resources are being consumed with things like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” said Patrick Wood, senior director of product management for Exinda, a provider of WAN optimization and application acceleration products based in Andover, Mass. “Nowadays, these applications that were once considered recreational have significant business value for many companies and are key to their marketing strategies and communication with customers and clients.”

Although purchasing more bandwidth is an option that has become more affordable, Wood suggested that in some cases, IT managers stabilize the performance of their network and ensure access to critical business applications by segmenting their network.

“You can use tools to slow Facebook access to a trickle,” he said. “While that will work in some cases, the key is understanding where your network bottlenecks are and how you want to control access. But if Facebook, Twitter or other applications that may not be necessary to your business are eating up 60 percent of your bandwidth, by gaining and understanding of how your network is performing, it might not be necessary to invest in more bandwidth.”

But what if the marketing or customer service teams are heavy users of social media technology as part of their job responsibilities? While it can take more effort on the part of the IT department, experts suggest that access to these technologies be based on job functions.

“While bandwidth and traffic-shaping tools can help ensure that critical applications such as your phone system, which are increasingly running on the network, aren’t brought down by recreational use of social media, it is clear that some jobs in an organization rely on social media much more than others,” said Andrew Rubin, CEO of Cymtec, a St. Louis-based provider of network performance and monitoring software. “The days of treating everyone equally when it comes to network access are over. You have to look at access to social networking not only look by population group, but industry by industry. Fashion or media companies might need more of their people using these tools than some other industries.”

Since it is not longer feasible in most business environments to block access to these sites entirely, IT managers need to work with other leaders in the organization to determine the appropriate social media policy for their business.

“As an IT manager, you have to talk to the business leaders in various departments and determine how much use is appropriate for the business, but in many instances, this is a conversation that hasn’t happened,” said Chris King, director of product marketing for Santa Clara-based Palo Alto Networks, a network security company.

A recent study conducted by Palo Alto Networks found that roughly 36 percent of enterprise network traffic is comprised of hundreds of applications that can evade the controls of conventional security solutions by either using SSL or port-hopping capabilities. “So simply blocking these sites will not stop people from gaining access,” King said.

In some cases, there is a knee-jerk response on the risk of allowing users to engage in social media activities at work.

“A bad employee doesn’t need social media to be unproductive. But you have to have policies in place that are based on business needs and requirements and those policies need to be monitored and enforced,” King said.

This story was provided by IT TechNewsDaily, sister site to BusinessNewsDaily.

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Where Do Profiles Go When Networking Sites Die?

Earlier this year, the failed social networking site Friendster sent a message to remaining users that it would erase all photos, blogs, comments and friend groups on May 31. But that didn’t mean user profiles would be tossed as well. Where did all that information go?

It’s a question that comes up a lot when you consider the steadily growing list of failed social networking sites that couldn’t survive the Facebook juggernaut. Sure, plenty of us probably deleted our Friendster accounts before hopping onto MySpace (and then did the same thing all over again when we jumped ship to Facebook), but the early social networking site was still populated when it relaunched in June. Friendster had taken those existing user profiles and rolled them over to its rebranded entertainment-oriented platform. 

 

 

Recycling user databases like that isn’t an uncommon practice in the United States, which is still hammering out online privacy standards and laws.

“At least in the U.S., what happens to consumers data after a company shuts down often depends on the company’s privacy policy, which in theory is binding, since the U.S. does not have anything comparable to online data retention laws like the EU’s so-called privacy directives,” said Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
In other words, what happens to the personal information you leave behind on social networking sites is largely up to the site owners.

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“Back in 2001, a famous case involved etoys.com, which tried to sell its customer database after shutting down, but got into trouble doing that precisely because of its privacy policy (which promised users it wouldn’t sell of their personal information),” Acquisti said. “Since then, companies have become smarter at playing this game, in the sense that they write policies that leave them more room for?  operation.”

Indeed, the personal tidbits we broadcast on social media are some of the most valuable commodities on the Web, since they give advertisers direct insight on how people behave and what they buy. For that reason, user profile information is like the pearl inside the oyster of a social networking site, whether it’s successful or not.

“Say one social networking site takes over another.  In the advertising world, such purchases are often for the data that these companies contain,” said Craig Wills, a computer science professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and online privacy expert. “Thus, rather than a social networking site going away, I suspect they would get bought by another social networking site for the data.” 

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Rolling over user profiles, as in Friendster’s case, can also help jumpstart a new or rebranded network.
“The new site might even use the data to automatically create accounts for users on the site as means to attract these users to the new site,” Wills told Discovery News.

These examples of profile “afterlife” underscore the importance of users paying attention to privacy policies and what they’re agreeing to when signing up for social media accounts.

“Once uploaded to the Internet, your data never dies – it just reincarnates in other forms,” Acquisti from Carnegie Mellon told Discovery News.

Credit: Don Farrall/Getty Images

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