The explosion of social media usage on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn has caught many by surprise. Facebook alone counts more than 250 million active users.

This has caused many organizations stress as they have sought to determine what, if anything, they should do to limit employee use or at least educate employees to the risk. And numerous risk areas have been identified, including disclosing proprietary information, exposing corporate computers to viruses, and inappropriate photographs that could cause embarrassment to the company.

News reports indicate that some organizations have banned access to these sites at work. The United States Marines are but one notable example. To help determine what is being done by employers, the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association conducted a survey among compliance and ethics professionals in late August 2009. Just under 800 responses were received from individuals at for-profit (both public and private), non-profit and governmental institutions.

The results indicate that there is far from a consistent approach either to policy making or monitoring of employee behavior. While some companies have set out a specific policy for their employees’ online social networking activities, half have not. Monitoring tends to be passive more than active, despite the fact that one quarter of respondents reported that their employer has had to discipline an employee for activities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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