What Is Your Social Networking Policy?What Is Your Social Networking Policy?

One of the areas we're asking enterprise IT executives about for our upcoming benchmark on unified communications and collaboration is organizational policies around the use of social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Not surprisingly, we've seen a huge variance in responses.Small companies, those in technology verticals, and educational institutions tend to be the most open, often not just allowing the use of public social networking sites, but actually encouraging it. Many universities that I've spoken with are extensively using Facebook for organizing class activities. Business schools are requiring students to leverage services such as LinkedIn to explore professional social networking opportunities.In more traditional companies we are typically seeing a split, with marketing and customer support groups often embracing social networking tools to create a community for their products and services, while restricting access by employees in other groups.This has created a bit of a backlash as IT executives continue to struggle to define legitimate uses for these services. We're seeing a growing generational gap as recent college grads find that the tools they use to communicate with colleagues build social and professional relationships are often blocked by their IT departments. Users are increasingly finding legitimate reasons to leverage sites such as Facebook to participate in discussions in topics related to their on-the-job activities. And of course, there's the on-going conflict between data protection requirements and the ability to allow individuals to participate in open discussions.The challenge in defining acceptable use policies continues to grow as social networking services expand. Enterprises would be wise to understand the potential benefits to their organization from employee participation in such services rather than simply blocking any and all use.