With today's popularity of social networking, there are many cautionary issues to concern IT leaders. From a management perspective, simply using any social networking tool to communicate with employees, either personally or professionally, can increase the risk of law suits. Click here to see an informative article that discusses the employee litigation risks that any manager may face in the use of social networking tools in conjunction with employees under their authority. Beyond the concerns any manager should have, IT leaders must give the risks associated with social networking special concern. While many organizations are reaping the benefits of using social networking technologies to reach customer and partner communities as well as to foster innovation, learning, and collaboration internally, little focus has been paid to managing, through technology and process, the associated risks.

Such risks include:

• increased exposure of company and trade secrets
• increased risk of non-compliance with confidentiality and privacy laws
• increased risk of litigation from employees, partners, or customers for claims of unfair pratice based upon information obtained through social networking

For some time, organizations have invested in content management security to reduce risk of confidential content being exposed in inadvertant or intentional emails or web posts. Little of this technology has matured to focus on social networking technology, but it's starting to. As an IT leader, this area should be one of your top 10 concerns in the months and years to come. It is not a question of 'if' but 'when' an incident involving social networking technology will have a negative impact for your company.