60 Second Survey Results: Social Media Policy

Here are the results of the (inaugural) 60 Second Survey we distributed on the topic of social media access policy.

Results

In the survey, we asked two basic questions: 1) Does your organization have a formal/written social media acceptable use policy? and 2) What level of access does your organization allow to each of the following social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Blogs, and Other?

The answer choices for this question were defined as follows:
3 – Unrestricted access – employees have unfettered access to this site
2 – General access – access to this site is generally open with only a few restrictions
1 – very limited access – access to this site is not permitted, but there are a few exceptions which are based on job function or other business need
0 – no access – all access to this site is blocked

Analysis / Commentary

The limited number of responses makes it difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from the data. That said, we were a bit surprised by the percentage of responses that reported having unrestricted or general access to most if not all social networking sites. It would be interesting to see if any of the gateway security / URL filtering manufactures have any statistics on how many of their customers block these sites. While even that data would not paint a complete picture, it could potentially give us a much broader view of the issue.

Background

The purpose of the survey was to get a quick snapshot of how organizations are handling the issue of employee social media use from work. The survey was published for approximately 48 hours via the securitymetrics.org discussion list, and several industry groups on LinkedIn. While the response rate was less than spectacular (we received 27 completed surveys), the responses we did receive were  interesting.

Participant Demographics

Below is a breakdown of the respondents by industry and organization size.