Facebook really is a threat

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been doing quite a bit of job hunting, and I always seem to meet people who warn me about the dangers of having a Facebook page while searching for a job. Of course, we have talked extensively in class about the many various problems associated with having potentially compromising content openly available to the public. Accordingly, I have locked my Facebook down so that I am in complete control of who sees my personal conversations and photos which I post. Additionally, companies are all taking a proactive approach by monitoring their employees’ actions on Facebook and even restricting their employees from using the service completely in some cases.

The idea that companies and organizations are actively looking at their employees’ and potential employees’ actions has really had me thinking about how these very same companies choose to present themselves on websites such as Facebook. Today, I came across an article, “Whole Foods working to curb Facebook-based scam”, which delves into the issues which companies face with their own Facebook pages. According to the article, Whole Foods wasn’t being proactive enough. In fact, someone else had posted a false Whole Foods Facebook page which offered coupons to those who joined the Facebook group. Now, Whole Foods is faced with a massive cleanup effort to mitigate the problems stemming from this fraudulent Facebook page.

This really got me thinking today about how influencial Facebook really can be; good or bad. More importantly though, I think it’s incredibly important to point out that companies have been actively policing their own employees, but perhaps they really should be doing more to watch out for more foreign threats through Facebook. Of course, many organizations already monitor and search the web and social networking sites for the use of their name, but I’m sure that there’s far more organizations which simply don’t.

The internet has always served as a forum for disseminating negative information about products and organizations. Likewise, it always seems that negative information has always spread like wildfire through customer reviews and general discussion. In the past, it seems as though companies tried to simply ignore the negativity. Today however, it is quite apparent that a dissatisfied customer can literally sabotage a company by merely posting a comment or page on Facebook. Perhaps it’s time that modern organizations recognize Facebook as not only an opportunity, but also as a very real threat. I really wouldn’t be surprised if an ‘Facebook protection team’ becomes a mandatory part of business models of all organizations in the future.