Nearly 30% of employers have fired employees for e-mail misuse, with reasons including inappropriate language, excessive personal use and breach of confidentiality, according to a 2007 from the American Management Association and consulting firm EPolicy Institute (Los Angeles Times, June 27, 2009)
According to the third annual Deloitte LLP Ethics & Workplace survey, 60 percent of business executives believe they have a right to know how employees portray themselves and their organizations in online social networks. However, employees disagree, as more than half (53 percent) say their social networking pages are not an employer’s concern. This fact is especially true among younger workers, with 63 percent of 18–34 year old respondents stating employers have no business monitoring their online activity. That said, employees appear to have a clear understanding of the risks involved in using online social networks, as 74 percent of respondents believe they make it easier to damage a company's reputation.
The Fortune 500 are farther along in their adoption of public-facing corporate blogs than previous data has suggested, according to a research study, The Fortune 500 and Blogging: Slow and Steady, conducted by the Society for New Communications Research and Financial Insite, a Seattle-based research firm.
The report shows that while the Fortune 500 companies are adopting social media at a slower rate than other leading businesses, universities and charities, many more of them are blogging than has been previously reported. For example, 81 of the Fortune 500 or 16 percent, currently have public-facing blogs. This compares with 39 percent of the Inc. 500; 41 percent of the higher education sector and 57 percent of the nation’s Top 200 Charities.
Among other findings:
Nearly seven out of 10 global executives fear for their corporate reputations as online risks grow, according to Weber Shandwick research conducted in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit. Among the many findings of Risky Business: Reputations Online...
Based on this research, Weber Shandwick identified 15 strategies for managing company reputation in an always-open, always-on global marketplace. These strategies range from benchmarking and monitoring reputations online, assessing the right proportion of online and offline communications, scouring the Internet to make sense of emerging rsiks and issues, embracing search engine optimization (SEO), buying domain names, and creating an ongoing dialogue with employees and advocates before and when problems arise.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes" (quote is commonly attributed to Mark Twain). According to The New York Times (October 13, 2008), today the saying might read as: "False reports manage to gain great purchase across the globe while the truth is still logging on." Examples of the speed of online impacting company reputation (or "reputational short-selling," coined in The New York Times article) include:
According to a paper published by ORMA (Online Reputation Management Association), the Internet is full of reputational vulnerabilities. Consider...
"Google is not a search engine. It's a reputation management system. Online your rep is quantifiable, findable and totally unavoidable." -- Wired magazine, April 2007
"Social media's real power lies in its ability to function as a recommendation engine in which real people praise or pillory products." -- SearchInsider, August 11, 2008
Research conducted by IT security and control firm Sophos revealed that 70% of businesses are concerned about sensitive material falling into the wrong hands as a result of data leakage via email. A further 50% of employees admit to having accidentally sent an embarrassing or sensitive email to the wrong person from the workplace. Sophos experts note that email leakage can potentially cause corporate embarrassment, compliance breaches and the loss of business critical information.
"A business's reputation will be based on an almost infinite amount of information sources. The Internet is a huge database of unstructured information. So when opinions start to butt up against each other, you get a bad-news petri dish. -- Toby Bell, Gartner Inc.