Want to spy on your employees and monitor how much time they’re spending on Facebook? Social Sentry is a new solution to help you accomplish just that. This Saas (Software as a Service), no-install web-based tool monitors employees’ conversations on a number of social networks including Facebook. Social Sentry supposedly works even if employees use alias profiles.
The fact is, people say all kinds of stupid things in real life, both at work and elsewhere. Social media just makes it easier to spread such conversations, and there’s no shortage of stories of people being fired over their indiscretions. One European City Council member was even voted off for continuing to play FarmVille, despite warnings. While the latter might not be harmful to an organization’s brand or financial state, conversations that reveal too much could be harmful. People are losing their jobs or being suspended, either because of photos or conversations posted to Facebook. If employees start to reveal sensitive information, then there’s the potential for real damage, not to mention sparking issues of compliance for publicly-owned companies.
Corporate protection from social media is what Teneros‘ Social Sentry is offering. According to the list of features, Social Sentry can monitor activity on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks from any device including mobile. Social Sentry apparently only monitors information that you’ve made public. So why, then, would you pay for something you can do for free? What Teneros offers as well is support for filtering rules (for automatic notification and alerts), real-time tracking, reporting and analytics, and easy deployment that is accessible from a web browser. The data sheet for Social Sentry (PDF, 2 pgs — which you’re supposed to register for but can access without) goes into a bit more detail about business uses of the monitoring tool but doesn’t talk much about the technical aspects.
There’s no indication of Social Sentry’s price, though I’m guessing Teneros charges a monthly subscription fee, and there might be need for training, consults, and/or support, which adds to the cost. If you don’t have the budget for social media monitoring tools, or cannot get the approval, you can do it at little or no cost — aside from the personnel and work time necessary. Here are a few quick tips:
- Google Alerts — Set up alerts for each employee’s name. These alerts end up sent to an email account, though there are supposedly ways to convert the results into a web (RSS) feed if you’re using a GMail account. In this case, the alerts feed could be sent to a Yahoo Pipes pipe (see #3 below). Note that Google Alerts searches fairly comprehensively on any pages that Google Search indexes. That means you can also check public Twitter status updates, blogs, and elsewhere. Just not, if employees have fairly common names, you may get a lot of “false” results.
- Facebook Search — Facebook’s own search feature has the advantage over Google Alerts of narrowing down the search results. If you have too many employees, considering creating a Facebook (or other) application that searches for publicly posted status updates, and use employee names as keywords. You can do something similar for Twitter conversations (and even use the same Facebook application interface to do it with).
- Yahoo Pipes – This is a visually-based web tool that lets you mashup multiple web feeds and filter them. Convert the above search results into web feeds, then fine tune the filtering rules in Yahoo Pipes, to narrow down the search results.
The above are just a few options for self-run monitoring. As for implementing “spying” procedures on employee use of social media, you could assign the work to someone in the HR or Legal departments, or possibly to an intern.
Do you run a business where employees use social media? Is this by permission? Have you been concerned about what your employees might be saying on Facebook or other social media? What have you done about your concerns? Or are you an employee who loves social media and feels that you should not be monitored? Let us know in the comments.
[Other sources: Sync Daily]
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TWITTER:
Just get a creative alias and a lock on your Twitter (the creative alias is not to be found easily, since your @nickname tweets can still be seen and Twitter activity can be monitored from that, though they can't read YOUR tweets).
FACEBOOK:
Create a seperate LIST on Facebook to have all your coworkers in and just share nothing with them. This way they have the feeling they're in, but that you're just pretty much inactive. There's tons of good manuals out there guiding you through the process of setting all information apart from certain lists. Close your Facebook profile for non-friends and make it non-searchable.
That will cover most of it to set you free.
Comment by @danwet — March 30, 2010 @ 4:45 pm
We can monitor our employers to remember. It works both ways.
Comment by Pete — March 30, 2010 @ 5:05 pm
According to NYT's Bits blog, the price of Social Sentry is $2 to $8 per employee that you monitor, depending on the size of the company.
I think spying on employees' social media activities is a false promise, though, because it doesn't prepare your workforce for the future, but penalizes them for developing the skills they'll need to keep you competitive.
Comment by John McCrory — March 30, 2010 @ 7:15 pm
This is ALL pointless, pretty much as mentioned, if the employees in question have private pages/activity.
Comment by Ally — March 31, 2010 @ 5:52 am
This is disturbing. Why are employers monitoring employees' personal lives like this? Imagine if the employees did the same thing to the bosses…
My personal life is none of my bosses' business.
Comment by Anon — April 2, 2010 @ 10:46 am
It's their business when you're doing it on company time and equipment.
Comment by Anon — April 2, 2010 @ 9:04 pm
very strange, there are many people that have the same name and many change their name to stay under cover.
Comment by BM — April 6, 2010 @ 10:37 am
This is definitely NOT pointless. This is extremely important to financial services firms for compliance reasons. The SEC can hold the executives of financial services firms personally accountable for things employees post on social media sites that breach strict compliance guidelines set by the government. How do I know? Because a very close family member who will remain nameless is a CFO of a major financial services firm, and he told me himself that the SEC has met with him and his company about this very issue. If his employees tweet or facebook about something like company performance, expectations, or possible future purchase or sale activity in various asset markets by the company, if those comments are posted in violation of SEC rules and regulations, the company and its executives can get in a lot of trouble. For such firms social media sites can be used as a form of advertising, and for disgruntled employees, faulty advertising. It’s a big deal and I know for a fact financial services executives are interested in paying a lot of money for a service that monitors this activity. The important thing to them is not necessarily to prevent employees from saying things that could hurt the company, but to be able to document and show the government or a court that they took precautionary steps, in good faith, to try to prevent such things from occurring.
Comment by RG — June 14, 2010 @ 4:32 pm
I agree your personal life is none of your bosses business, however negative or malicious comments about your boss or the company that you work for and he is head of, is his business, and that is the rub, we have had people post very negative and malicious gossip about our company on the web, all which was based on incorrect information or only one part of the story or just downright lies. So yes I agree that a boss should be able to monitor what is being said about him his employees and his company by his employees.
Comment by Guest — November 5, 2010 @ 10:36 pm
Employee monitoring software now a day is very useful where employers can have a glimpse on how employees use their computer at work. These way employers can assure that employees are working not just spending their time on unrelated to work activities like Facebook. Using this kind of tools it can help employees improve productivity. However, when this tool has been improperly used it will give you negative effects. This will result to employee’s low morale and productivity. In order to manage employees effectively use non invasive tools for monitoring. Check this blog for more information about what is <a title="ethical monitoring" href="http://www.timedoctor.com/blog/2011/04/14/compare-screen-monitoring-software">ethical monitoring?
Comment by steven — January 17, 2012 @ 4:11 am