Employers are looking for better control. The American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute do an annual survey of companies on their approach to digital media, and more than 60 percent of the companies who responded in the most recent survey said they have some social media policy in place. Like e-mail, employees’ social media creates a paper trail that could be used in litigation, said Nancy Flynn, the executive director of the ePolicy Institute.

“You definitely want to take advantage of your legal right to monitor,” said Ms. Flynn.

Unlike corporate e-mail accounts, however, social networking isn’t clearly of the working world. While it is publicly accessible, many users see it as an informal and intimate form of communication. And well-documented confusion over privacy settings means that some information is being made public without users’ knowledge.

Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a research and advocacy group, called the automatic monitoring of social networking a “disaster,” and predicted that it would lead to people being fired for online griping, the airing of political views and other innocuous conversation. There is a tendency to react to an off-color joke or complaint that appears online more harshly than to the same comment made in a cafeteria or company picnic.

But he also said that there is little recourse for those whose social networking activity gets them in trouble.

“I’m a privacy advocate, and I wouldn’t stand up before Congress and say your boss shouldn’t be allowed to read your social networking sites,” he said. “You’re putting it out there for the world.”

By Nytimes.com

Our input on this : Don’t …send the strong message that you are open and respect your employees.

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