Ban social networks, but not LinkedIn

By Davey Winder on May 23rd, 2010 4:51 pm

That's the surprising consensus reached at a meeting of 30 CSOs representing some of the UK's leading enterprises held in London during the past week. This despite a poll at the bi-annual CSO Interchange event revealing that those same CSOs view social networking as the most over-hyped threat.

When it came to the round table discussions on the subject of social networking, however, the gathered CSOs expressed what has been called a "strong preference" for companies to consider banning them all. Well, almost all, as LinkedIn gets an exception as most of the CSOs considered that acceptable. Could that possibly have something to do with the CSOs being more likely to be active members of LinkedIn, a business-to-business oriented social network, than Facebook or Twitter I wonder? Perhaps they missed the news about LinkedIn and Twitter integration last year.

Indeed, polling showed that some 75 percent of companies represented had already chosen to go down the social networking ban route, pretty much the same number as the same poll last year indicated. Interestingly, considering that this was a meeting of security executives, the ban reasoning was as much to do with an impact on productivity as it was matters security related.

Even more interestingly. the gathered CSOs admitted that they recognised any company which did ban social networking tools risked alienating the younger members of the workforce and they would be likely to resort to their own mobile devices - and potentially open up further cans of security worms as a result.

Elsewhere in the discussion, a conclusion was reached that there was an urgent need for a common set of industry standards to enable companies to evaluate and compare alternative cloud providers. The consensus being that there's an unstoppable move towards cloud computing and that the industry needs to focus on developing best practices on how to choose and deploy cloud computing solutions.

Another area of heated debate centred on the role of the IT professional five years from now. About 35 percent of the CSOs claimed that their roles already include technical, legal, managerial, political and communications elements, whilst 22 percent still view their roles as predominantly technical. The discussions on this subject touched on the reduction in the number of internal IT staff required by organizations due to the move to cloud computing infrastructures and the migration of the majority of the remaining roles from internal support roles towards managing large data centre infrastructures, either for cloud vendors or for large corporate users.

Qualys Chairman and CEO and Founder of CSO Interchange Philippe Courtot summed up the meeting: "the discussions and views aired at these events always reinforce my view of the immense and ever-changing nature of the challenges facing today’s CSOs. It’s no longer sufficient to be technologically astute but increasingly in the future they will also need to display a variety of skills ranging from technician to communicator and evangelist".

2 Years Ago

Just further proof, these folks are totally out of touch with today's computing environment and their own organizations. There's a clear lack of understanding among executives that I've witnessed at conferences. They often don't understand the difference between Web 2.0 tools like Facebook and Twitter and Enterprise 2.0 tools that have many of the same functions behind the firewall. They fail to see the open web tools like Facebook and Twitter as marketing channels, nor do they know that chances are their marketing department is making use of Facebook and Twitter, whether they are aware or not.

As for cloud computing, it's a similar story. When asked, most CIOs here in the States say they want to go slow, not knowing that many departments have already implemented their own solutions like Salesforce.com.

These are not the people to ask because these days, they really have no idea what's going on inside their own organizations.

Techwriter10

Veteran Poster

1,059 posts since Apr 2008

Reputation Points: 54

Solved Threads: 1

2 Years Ago

Just because of something has happened banning the social networking sites is not at all proper in my sense. In my opinion you to should also think one to two times before taking any step. At last don't ban the social networking sites because it stops business, relationship and networking too.

haute34

Newbie Poster

13 posts since Apr 2010

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 0

2 Years Ago

Social Networking sites is a growing innovation in the marketing platform. As a business, you have the tools to reach the masses to enhance your business marketing strategy. Instead of banning, learn to use it as a productive tool. The beauty of the information age is it is still growing, we need to use it to our advantage. Now we can target our market to all types of people globally.

agnsolutions

Newbie Poster

2 posts since May 2010

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 0

1 Year Ago

Social Networking sites should not go down as it drives many people to stay in touch together out there, it has relation with, business, networking, marketing and many more, If it happens then all the top level things will go down since they are relying their self on Social Networking websites.

JamesAlbany

Newbie Poster

12 posts since May 2010

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 0

1 Year Ago

Banning social networking site is of course not the actual solution..Instead companies should understand its importance and learn to it as a tool to access the target audience..

smokewire

Light Poster

29 posts since May 2010

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 1

1 Year Ago

Quite a narrow minded view to ban social networking sites other than Linkedin.

Its very important to test various area's to see which works for you before you dismiss them. Someone had to be the first to use Linkedin before it gained in popularity, same as Facebook and Twitter. Personally if any of these are driving people to purchase from us then thats a good thing. If not then I don't waste my time on them.

Asset Chemist

Newbie Poster

1 post since Oct 2010

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 0

1 Year Ago

Nice thread, but banning all social networks will lead more professions to go home. Especially social media people.

joelchrist

Posting Whiz

345 posts since Mar 2010

Reputation Points: 2

Solved Threads: 8

1 Year Ago

Dont ban social networks! they re the future

raman1

Newbie Poster

13 posts since Oct 2009

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 1

1 Year Ago

No body can Ban Social Network, It is the Back bone of the internet. I am earning over 30% of my overall traffic from Social Media Channel, Thats how I dont need to wait for search engine traffics doing nothing. Now I work hard on Social Network Channel and enjoy continuous source of Quality Traffic.

Nice post Happygeek.

Living-seo-life

Junior Poster

118 posts since Oct 2010

Reputation Points: 10

Solved Threads: 1

This article has been dead for over three months

You