Blocking Social Media–What is Your View?

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If you are reading my blog posts regularly, you might have seen that I am not
a big friend of blocking social media at the edge. When I talk with customers
about why they are blocking it, I usually get these type of answers:

  • People are spending too much time playing games on Facebook: This,
    to me, is a management problem and not a technology problem and should be
    addressed accordingly.
  • We are afraid of malware: This makes sense to me. The question is,
    whether this is limited to social media or better, how much you can really
    reduce the risk of a malware attack by blocking social media
  • We are afraid of information leakage: Interesting. Steve Ballmer
    was once asked, why Microsoft applies such an open policy when it comes to
    social media and whether he is not afraid of information leakage. His answer
    was, that he lets people talk to media and customers as well and that the risk
    is not much higher. Well, this is probably not true anymore but fairly often,
    when it comes to internal events, people are reminded that this information is
    not to be tweeted or blogged. It works well and where it does not, there might
    have to be administrative processes to be invoked.

A modern company today most probably has to use social media to position
itself. So, we are kind of caught between two angels. I would really like to
understand your view on this:

  • Why do you think that blocking social media is good (or bad)?
  • What are the risks you are trying to address?
  • If you block, how big do you see the risk of users trying to get around your
    filtering mechanisms?

Let’s start a debate here, I want to learn from you.

As I would like to consolidate the discussion, would you mind leaving your comments on my main blog here? Thank yu

Roger