Osterman Research conducted a study and found that corporate users spend an average of 18 minutes on a typical workday using social networking tools (or about 4% of their workday). Indeed our own survey showed a change from 2009 to 2010 in the business use of Twitter, going from 13% of users to 78% , a 6-fold increase.Adoption of social computing and social networking in the enterprise is being driven by individuals and departments within the company, such as the Marketing & PR teams who want to use social networking for corporate messaging and advertisements or analysts who wish to publish “market”-relevant data. These are the folks who need write access.Conversely, there are those corporate users that only need read-only access. This could be departments like HR/Compliance/IT Security, which use social media to research new hires or conduct investigations. And then there’s the issue of personal use. We’ve found that restricted personal use is generally OK so long as clear guidelines are made available company-wide.
So now that I’ve set the context for you and discussed the risks and regulations, it might calm your nerves, knowing that controls are available to address these security, management, and compliance concerns.Whether it’s preventing inadvertent or malicious leakage of information through social networks, protecting against hidden phishing or trojan attacks, or mapping the identities of your users across different social networking sites, there are solutions out there that enable you to comply with applicable security and compliance guidelines. For instance, it’s possible to control the activities of organizations, groups, or even individual users by setting policies, such as “only Marketing can post content” or “HR can have only read-only access to LinkedIn”. If the moderation of content is important to you (perhaps if you’re FINRA-regulated), then it’s now possible to have a second pair of eyes reviewing content before it’s posted, with little impact on the end user. And if that content is inappropriate, you can block it. If you want to enable the use of Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, but block the use of thousands of applications within them, then that’s also doable, as is the logging and archiving of all activity and content, so that you have a full picture of the real-time communications of and between your users. At Actiance, we’ve been in the business of real-time communications security, management, and compliance since 2001, so we understand and know how to seamlessly integrate these real-time controls with your existing IT infrastructure.
With respect to the URL filtering and anti-malware features, you can allow or block access to certain categories, such as restaurants, shopping, sports, etc. Coaching is also permitted. This is like telling someone, “You sure you wanna go there?” Facetime also supports time quotas, whereby you can set a policy such that you can limit how much time your employees spend on specific sites. For instance, you can apply a policy that says that Marketing can only spend 30 minutes a day on Facebook.
And applying those controls is simple: from controlling access to more than 1000 social networking sites to incredibly granular control of 40,000 applets on Facebook. We allow you to set controls by category or right down to the individual application. For example, you want to block access to the 150 chat applications on Facebook but allow access to the 2,142 Facebook business applications. No problem. Or perhaps you want to allow access to just 100 of the business apps and not to the other 2,000 or so. That’s possible, too.
In fact, when it comes to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, there are nearly a hundred different features where controls can be applied. So if you don’t want your CEO using LinkedIn messaging, you can block that. You can stop the compliance team from using Facebook Careers or the HR team from following groups on LinkedIn. You can even make all of LinkedIn read-only, if that floats your boat.
We also enable you to set your policies through easy pointing and clicking. You can choose to either Store, Alert, Block, or Moderate, or any combination of these four controls, for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Furthermore, if you don’t have the time or the resources to moderate every single message that passes through the corporate network, you can set up lexicons such that certain keywords or phrases will trigger the system to withhold messages. For instance, if it’s a social security number or credit card number format, you can set a policy so that the system will catch and hold those messages that have that format.
We also capture all the activities and posts of users on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter – in context. So you can see that when Ted tried to share the phrase “I guarantee it”, he was actually talking about the upcoming football game, not an investment suggestion. Moreover, data can be presented for eDiscovery and exported to the archiving platform of your choice.
Moderators can easily navigate through their queue of pending messages through our easy-to-use interface. Moderators have the option to approve or reject in bulk or individually from the Moderator Events page. But, to really appreciate the true value-add of Facetime’s Socialite, you can click on individual ID numbers to see full transcripts in context. We’re able to capture everything on, say, a Facebook page at the moment someone tried to post a comment. This gives the moderator a much more informed basis on which to approve or reject messages. You certainly don’t want to erroneously reject an otherwise-benign message. For example, a message of “I guarantee it” may have been in reference to the upcoming Lakers-Celtics basketball game, not to some stock recommendation. So, being able to review messages in context is incredibly important.