Social Media

Social media use and monitoring in the workplace

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

  1. social media use is accepted in the workplace,
  2. the negative consequences (for me) are marginal, and
  3. 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

SocialMedia Risks v6-01

Figure 2: Treemap of Social media monitoring tools

social media tools v2-01

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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