If you have just started using social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or blogging to market your company and interact with customers?it is time to be cautious. It might come as a shocker to many that careless use of social media can result into reduced stock price, increased litigation costs, direct financial costs, damaged brand reputation and loss of revenue. Well, so believe 90% of the respondents (enterprises) to the global social media 2011 survey by Symantec, a security, storage and systems management solutions provider. Today, 82% of Indian enterprises use Facebook, while 54% officially use Web-based consumer email and 62% use blogs?one can imagine the risk all these firms are facing.

Vijay Mhaskar, vice-president at Symantec shares the upcoming trend and what can lead to damage on social media: ?There is a big trend to reach out to potential customers by using video posts and other content on social networking sites which can be a risk. These videos or content cannot always be suitable for mass consumption. Also, usually companies try to solve problems via answering queries on the websites and this too reveals the firm?s strategy to masses. All this can be used against companies by rivals or anybody who has a vested interest against the firm.?

Among Indian enterprises, 69% of respondents indicated that they did not feel sufficiently protected while using blogs, followed by social networking sites (50%), microblogs (47%), Web-based consumer email (44%) and instant messaging (42%). Interestingly, while most enterprises were concerned about the threats of instant messaging tools, the least number of respondents feel protected while using this technology. The biggest concern was around the use of instant messaging (IM), with 57% of respondents rating IM as a major security threat.

Social media is being increasingly used in business for collaboration and communication.

Vinoo Thomas, technical product manager, McAfee Labs feels that when companies use LinkedIn for headhunting or blogging for interaction, they put up their specific project details and company specific photographs. ?Sensitive information can be used for a targeted attack on the company,? he says. The 2011 survey by Symantec found that the top three social media incidents a typical enterprise experienced over the last year were employees sharing too much information in public forums (46 %), the loss or exposure of confidential information (41%) and increased exposure to litigation (37%).

According to Gartner, ?By year-end 2013, 50% of all companies will have been asked to produce material from social media websites for eDiscovery.? An archiving software solution can help organisations permit employees to use social media for business purposes and enable the preservation, search and discovery of specific content from tools such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SharePoint and blogs.

Ready for remedy

Thomas from McAfee feels that employee awareness at a human level is the best way to control virus attacks on social media. Take the case of IT company iGATE-Patni. Chelsea Namasivayam, CIO of the company shares: ?As a best practice, our employee induction programme educates and elucidates the perils of exposure and the damage through social media one will be liable too. Such terms are also included in the offer letters and seek acceptance of the employees before they become a part of our family. Having said that, we encourage employees to reach out and share information, but without causing breach of any client confidentiality agreement. In addition to this, we also have specific tools which curb the upload or download of files over the social sites.?

The Symantec survey also reveals that 80% or more global enterprises are discussing remedies like introducing social media policy (87%), employee training (86%), processes to capture confidential/proprietary data (85%), data loss protection (85%), technology to manage data (84%) and collect/archive sensitive information (82%).

Globally, a few of the enterprises have already implemented these security strategies. But the component of companies doing that still remains less than 25% on an average. So there is a long way to go.