Revealing Your Secrets With Social Networks Online

May.03, 2010 in Internet

The public and corporations both have concerns about social networks online, 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 classroom to learn just what sort of information to post online, and what they should keep off the net altogether.

Businesses, too, need to keep their most crucial and private information safe from hackers. But they have the added concern about how to use online social networks to become more friendly with and responsible to customers, without going overboard and revealing too much.

Here, too, secrets can be divulged, after all. Social media optimization might mean using the new media to create better relationships with customers, but it doesn’t mean employees can divulge anything they want about the company.

Some groups now talk about enforced policies for integrated social media strategy, to help “police” the multitude of online 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 education 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.