Social Networking is a big deal right now. Facebook has more than 800 million active users with pages about movie stars, soft drinks, politicians and games. Twitter sees thousands of tweets every second with more than a hundred million active users ranging from Christina Aguilera to the Pope. LinkedIn reached 100 million users back in March. Google+, Youtube, MySpace and more all provide extraordinary opportunities for businesses to establish authority and credibility, as well as the impressively useful technique of crowdsourcing, where users reach out to their circles of friends and colleagues for support, recommendations, knowledge and opinions.
Social networking offers a number of opportunities for contingent labor programs. Imagine crowdsourcing to your circle of contacts about recommended suppliers, for example. But for people concerned with information security, it’s also quite alarming. What if someone tweets sensitive information?
It’s already happened in the public sector, and it’s generated some serious consequences. Consider the overturning of a death sentence because a juror tweeted about the trial.
We won’t list them here, but you can easily search for a list of generally embarrassing Twitter-based scandals and disastrous Facebook posts. Used to be you’d be limited to those awkward-enough emails where you hit reply-all instead of just to the sender. Now if you click too hastily, you share something permanent with the whole Internet.
Government intervention makes security even more of a challenge for publicly available networks. The recent kerfuffle about India’s communications minister wanting to screen “questionable” content from Twitter opens up a can of worms about the privacy of shared information.
Has your labor program made use of social networking to any great effect? Has it caused any friction regarding security of information? Please share your own experiences. We’d love to hear from you.