Social media
Social Media Will Penetrate Corporate Firewalls
Filed under: Business, Social Media, Trends
Few weeks ago we posted our predictions for the 2010 social media scene. Now we will try to explain these trends in a little bit more detail.
Some of our corporate customers don’t have access to Facebook or any other social media in their offices. The reason is mostly that the important IT people think that Facebook and other social media channels are endless sources of exploits, phishing, spam and other evil things I don’t even dare to say.
My own view is a bit lighter and I believe that if the security framework is sound then social nets don’t pose much of a threat. But whatever the security people might think the pressure to open up communications will grow.
Direct communication with customers in sales, real-time support services, social media integration into CRM systems and other benefits will gradually help social media to reach behind the mighty corporate firewall.
Of course, there might be some negative effects. For example productivity may suffer because of the time that people use for personal social media activity. On the other hand this personal interaction might be seen as “being human” and actually help the brand to be more authentic.
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I agree that the push for social media to pass through corporate security regulations is inevitable. However, brand image and negative PR from unscrupulous employees is still quite a touchy issue – even if it lends a bit of humanity to the face of the company. Companies just haven’t been hiring people with consideration to their “social reach” and influence long enough yet.
While issues such as time management can be address through “corporate access gateways” — imagine tunnel access to popular social networking sites, such as facebook or digg, that restrict defined actions, such as blocking applications in facebook, or filtering content in digg … Companies will still have to establish a workforce that has been hired with social networks in mind. Without that confidence, I think the risk is just too big to open up existing policies.
Great points Allan. I sometimes tend to overlook the point that some people might do harm intentionally and sometimes it just bad luck and circumstance that lead to brand damaging communications.