Some actual social media posts:

• “….we need to hold this f%#@er and all his racist supporters accountable.”
• “Threatened with a $200k lawsuit from idiot client who misrepresented the scope of their project and took longer than originally planned.”
• “What a stupid client, how can he be an engineer for so many years!”
• “I have 2 moods. 1) I love working let’s get moneyyyy 2) I never want to work again I want to kill every customer.”

Given that somebody’s employees have already posted these comments, what would you do if it was your employee that did so?

1. Nothing.
2. Accept the fact that employees can do what they want on their own time, regardless of the consequences for your company?
3. Communicate with your employees about the importance of considering what they post on social media before they do so.
4. Remind employees about the importance of following your company’s social media policy that specifically addresses identifying their employer on their personal social media pages.

Any company can choose a, b or c, but many companies can’t opt for option d because they don’t have a social media policy – or at least one that is sufficiently thorough or detailed that would address a situation like these.

Even with the best tools in place to monitor and review social media, this issue has implications beyond just those that are focused on technology and policies. Should employees be allowed to tweet anything they want while in your employ? Should employers have the right to restrict employee activities on social media after-hours? Should courts or regulators have the right to access employees’ social media posts?

We will be writing a white paper shortly on the importance of managing social media well – not only from the perspective of providing robust security capabilities so that social media can’t act as a conduit for malware, phishing or other threats – but also from the perspective of establishing good social media policies, monitoring what people are saying via social media when using the corporate network, and archiving business content in social media posts.