CHAPTER 12
Human Resources Monitoring & Reporting

In the previous parts of the book, we covered how to assess your current environment for social media weaknesses, methods for determining the threats to your reputation and security, and the tools and techniques for implementing operational guidelines. In this part of the book, we cover the monitoring and reporting tactics that you have to implement so you know what’s going on within your company and in the public sphere. If you can’t measure your activities, you will never know if you are making any progress toward social media security nirvana.

As we discussed in Chapter 4, companies face numerous threats via social media channels. These threats basically concern the loss of confidential information, allowing access to hackers via network security weaknesses in social media platforms, intellectual property challenges, and customer relationship issues. We reviewed a number of controls in Part III and now we turn to how to effectively monitor and report on social media activities in Part IV.

The first step in the monitoring and reporting process is, of course, the Human Resources part of our H.U.M.O.R. Matrix. Monitoring tracks confidential data loss, compliance to industry regulations, and enables reputation management. Requirements and departmental responsibilities have to be clearly defined, and the social media policies defined by HR have to be implemented and managed as the environment changes.

According to a Job vite Survey in 2009, companies use LinkedIn 75 percent of the time for background checks, Facebook 48 percent of the time, and Twitter 26 percent of the time (http://recruiting.jobvite.com/news/press-releases/pr/jobvite-2009-social-recruitment-survey.php). For recruiting purposes, companies use LinkedIn 95 percent of the time, Facebook 56 percent, and Twitter 42 percent. Although social media can be used by the HR department as a force for good, many HR departments see social media as a loss of productivity and view it as a source of liability. According to the Ethos Business Law/Russell Herder Social Media Survey in 2009, 51 percent of companies fear productivity loss, 49 percent fear reputation damage, and 80 percent fear social media is a liability. To ensure social media security, Human Resources has to integrate monitoring as part of their daily practice for everything from tracking time wasters to illegal activity.

Seeing as HR uses social media as a tool to hire and fire employees, a better employee monitoring process needs to be in place. In this chapter, we discuss how Human Resources plays an active role in developing your company’s monitoring and reporting solutions, including setting up the criteria for monitoring employees and compliance measures the company has to follow, defining the baseline requirements for what employees can and cannot do in social media, and disseminating policies to the organization.