The Marine Corps is banning social media. In the corporate world, there is widespread confusion or at least lack of consensus on the value/detriment of employees using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (or even non work-related Internet use in general.) Companies should develop a policy to guide their decisions and avoid the time-wasting conversations that will happen when management makes arbitrary decisions and demands that IT enforce them.

I’m curious what the experience of IT professionals is with respect to monitoring, blocking, and otherwise regulating employee access to social media. It is fairly trivial to block certain websites or applications at the network level, but such actions will lead employees to find a way around…

You can certainly use network monitoring software like Heroix Longitude to evaluate whether there are bandwidth issues from employee usage. But usually the problems are not just about bandwidth–there is the “lost time” argument which presumes workers who deviate from their task list are “stealing time” from the company and there is the “idiot factor”–the employee who updates his or her Facebook status with confidential or proprietary company information. These are not really IT issues…but ultimately, where culture, company norms, and common sense fail to achieve the desired results, management will come knocking on the door to IT for answers to questions and solutions to problems.