SMBs Weigh Security Risks of Facebook, Social Networking

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These days, small organizations with limited marketing dollars are faced with increasing pressure to open up their doors and enable access to sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other social networking tools.

But with the increased publicity and access come untold privacy, productivity and security challenges. And while organizations in all market segments suffer, the cash-strapped, resource-bereft SMB usually gets hit the hardest when incidents arise.

A Symantec “2011 Social Media Protection Flash Poll” found that the typical organization experienced nine social media incidents — such as an employee posting confidential information on his or her profile. Of all the surveyed organizations, 94 percent suffered negative consequences, including damage to their reputation, loss of customer trust, data loss and lost revenue.

Meanwhile, social media incidents have cost the average company $4 million over the past 12 months, according to the study. While many larger organizations could swallow those costs, a price tag in the millions could be devastating to a small- or medium-size business, with the worst-case scenario that includes shuttering operations completely.

As such, social media has lately become the conversation du jour with their SMB customers, many solution providers say. And hands down privacy concerns top the list of SMB challenges. The free marketing and publicity allowed by Facebook and Twitter often networks serves to backfire when ill-informed employees slander the organization or disclose damaging information online.

“You get customers where half their staff is tweeting or putting out posts of stupid stuff during the course of the day, and someone who is a friend of a friend finds it,” said Carl Mazzanti, vice president of eMazzanti Technologies, a Hoboken, N.J.-based solution provider. “Your most private conversation is now the conversation of everyone. You can’t retract it—it’s done.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Symantec study found that the top three social media incidents all revolve around privacy concerns, with 46 percent experiencing employees haring too much information in public forum, 41 percent suffering loss of exposure of confidential information, and 37 percent increasing their exposure to litigation.

Those privacy issues could include anything from disparaging the company in a Facebook rant and unintentionally revealing embarrassing personal information, to deliberately disclosing confidential company information that could damage the company’s reputation or arm its competition.

“For example, if someone posts ‘My work sucks, I can’t wait to get out of here!” on their status, other people who know that person will immediately identify that company as not a pleasant place to be,” said Richard Hyde, , sales director for Whitehall, Penn.-based EZMicro. “Worse yet, they may be a mutual friend with the owner of that company—talk about raising some eyebrows on employee morale!”

Meanwhile, productivity is another challenge facing the SMB, channel partners say.

Last year, workplace inefficiencies were listed as number one, followed by malware, data loss and viruses as the four top threats caused by insecure Web 2.0 applications, according to a June 2010 Ponemon Institute study titled “Web 2.0 Security In The Workplace.”

And partners maintain that productivity issues are still top of mind. While larger enterprises can sometimes overlook lost productivity costs, SMBs often feel the sting of lost work time even when one of their members fails to pull their weight, simply due to the fact that employees generally have bigger overall responsibilities and are often required to perform multiple job functions, solution providers say.

“Productivity is the main concern,” Hyde said. “Too many people get sucked into the lure of always keeping up with what’s going on.”

In addition, SMBs that enable Facebook and Twitter for part or all of the day are opening themselves up to a maelstrom of malware and phishing attacks, delivered via Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites.

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The Problem With Google+ Is That It’s Work Facebook

The latest issue of Wired contains an essay arguing that social media isn’t social. Oddly, the piece inadvertently nails why I’m skeptical about Google Plus:

The best evidence that social media isn’t really about personal connection? Marketers love it. It seems like every business from taco trucks to GE is hoping to use social media to put a personal face on its brand.

Sure, Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr are marketing havens now. But none of them started off that way. There was, in fact, real skepticism as to what a brand would do on Twitter for its first few years.

Those services took off precisely as places where interactions were personal, and it was only later, after enough people congregated there and began having conversations and interactions, that brands jumped in. It’s the same story of blogging, and the Web itself.

It wasn’t until late 2008 that brands were really began to get on board on Twitter, after it had been around for more than two years. Likewise, Facebook ignored and shunned brands in its early years. First, there were conversations, which caused brands to begin listening.

By contrast, Google+ has been a brand magnet from the beginning, which makes me deeply skeptical of it.

The social media services that work best—Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Foursquare— are often non-obvious to marketers (be they corporate or personal brand builders) when they launch. Anything that’s really game-changing (see also: blogs) is typically so unfamiliar that it’s met with corporate and media skepticism if not derision. But in today’s more social-media savvy environment, brands hit the ground running on Google Plus. (Especially the media.) They jumped ahead of the conversation.

Despite Google’s prohibitions, brand after brand has been creating Google+ profiles—often only to see Google pull them. And with Google being slow to allow corporate accounts, brands have sought other ways to fill the vid. This has led to some hilarious results, like poor Michael Dell wasting his time in a Google+ Hangout, trying to connect with customers.

My boss, Joe Brown, calls Google+ “Work Facebook.” (Nevermind that LinkedIn is also Work Facebook.) Google+ feels like work, because everyone is trying so damn hard to work it. It is a deep, dark hole of self-promotion. And that makes it boring.

Successful social media is social. First and foremost. The modern landscape may be littered with marketers, but you can’t ignore how we got here.

Social media must first play host to meaningful conversations if it is to be successful. It must be a forum where friendships can be created, strengthened and preserved. I’d argue that the most successful people and brands using social media are precisely the ones who are the most real, and the most deeply personal. Reveal something about yourself, even if it’s that you are an idiot, and people will follow. For a social network to work, it has to be fascinating and fun.

In short, before you can make it work, you have to make it play. But when brands and self-promotors lead the way, there’s nothing interesting to see.

And for Google+, that’s still the problem.

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