Privately held Facebook's move to assert greater control over user-generated content caused a firestorm this week, leading the popular social networking site to quickly revert to its existing policies while it reformulates its terms of use. Facebook's troubles reflect a growing need among enterprise IT managers to pro-actively develop and enforce policies for employee use of public social networking sites that enables legitimate business use while minimizing risk to intellectual property.

Nemertes' research finds over 54% of Unified Communications and Collaboration participants say their organization uses, is planning to use, or is evaluating social networks for internal and external collaboration, while 51% lack any kind of social networking policy.

Impacts:

Enterprises: Develop an acceptable use policy for public social networking sites, implement policy monitoring and management and enforcement tools. Make sure you know the terms of service for popular sites including Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace.

Vendors: Exploit opportunities to deliver systems that enable IT managers to create and enforce policy management for the use of public social networking sites.

Investors: Follow information protection vendors such as privately held Facetime and Websense (NASDAQ:WBSN)

Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research

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