Secure Enterprise 2.0 Blog

I am often asked how to best leverage the social networking world for business purposes and personal growth.  So I have put together a short list that sums up a few pointers to get you started on secure enterprise social networking:

1. Set limits about what you are willing to expose about yourself and remember the context of the interaction (business or personal). Be wary, since embarrassing or inappropriate information about yourself may appear in contexts that you did not expect. It is very difficult to “clean up” your profile later on.
2. Social networks are not just for play. Treat the network as a resource of valuable information, and tap into your colleagues’ expertise with the collaborative tools available on the network.
3. Educate your social networking friends, and they will rely on you as a valuable resource. Incorporate news items, blog posts and interesting tidbits into the discussion. Social networks are all about sharing information with your friends and work colleagues. 
4. Try and build a single “space” where all your friends meet – work, family, etc. Many of these contacts are more than just friends, co-workers or professional acquaintances anyways. Trying to work with multiple networking platforms makes life confusing and much harder to network.
5. Do not spam your friends or network. Most social networking platforms have a sophisticated yet absolutely lethal mechanism to eradicate spammers or “unsolicited evangelists”. You can still talk about the issues that matter to you and engage friends and coworkers using the collaboration tools available on the network, without exploiting them.
6. Word of advice - do not badmouth your company’s customers in an open discussion group. It is bound to bounce back and one day you may find a cardboard box with your name on it waiting on your desk. Be civilized in your discussions.
7. Secret is not secured. Some social networks, like Facebook, allow users to engage in private or secret groups. Although these forums take place away from the public eye, apt hackers can still crack open the discussion boards and access conversations, unless appropriate enterprise-grade safeguards have been put in place.
8. When adding RSS feeds to a feed reader, always prefer to use a link you got from the content provider’s web site rather than from any third party (an email, an IM, a link on a social networking site etc.) This improves the likelihood that the information you are seeing is what the content provider intended.
9. When entering your username and password on any site, always verify first that the URL in the browser’s address bar matches the URL of the site you (think) you are accessing. This is the best way to ensure your password won’t be intercepted by some evil-doer.
10. Never enter your username and password on a page you arrived at by clicking on a link in an email, IM message, third party web site or social networking site. These are the tools hackers use most often to steal passwords. 

David