Companies urged to weigh risks and benefits of social networking

Social networking sites have advantages and disadvantages

Companies should seek to adopt social networking services while remaining wary about the security risks, according to McAfee's Greg Day.

The senior threat researcher said on Wednesday that, if managed properly, sites such as Facebook and Twitter can offer effective and low cost ways for firms to connect with customers.

Day noted that companies such as Dell have used social networking services to connect with customers, and cited a recent study which suggested that enterprise adoption of micro-blogging service Twitter was set to further increase over the next 12 months.

"It is a very cheap and efficient way to get your message out to a high volume of people," said Day.

While the services have advantages, they also pose risks to businesses. Day outlined a number of concerns facing companies, ranging from data disclosure to malware infection and copyright infringement.

One such example offered by the researcher was Virgin Atlantic. While the company has made use of a corporate Facebook account to connect with users, the airline was also recently embarrassed following the discovery of an employee group on Facebook which harshly mocked and criticised the company and its customers.

In adopting social networking services, Day suggested that companies move forward with a well-established set of employee guidelines and corporate policies.

While such a task seems daunting, Day suggested that many of the pieces were already in place in the form of web filtering, anti-malware and user access policy controls.

"When I look at Twitter I get text and hyperlinks, so my traditional content filtering can control where I am going," he said. "It is all the tools we have been using for years."