As the world becomes more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent and the population continues to embrace social computing, today’s enterprises face the dawn of a new era – the era of the Social Business. Just as the Internet changed the marketplace forever, the integration of social computing into enterprise design represents another enormous shift in the landscape. Organizations that successfully transform into a Social Business can potentially reap great benefits – among them the ability to deepen customer relationships, drive operational efficiencies and optimize the workforce.

According to a recent Gartner prediction report: “By 2014, 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices. Support for corporate applications on employee-owned smartphones is impacting an increasing number of organizations and will become commonplace in four years. The main driver for adoption of mobile devices will be employees who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices. Enterprises will no longer be able to standardize on one or a few corporate mobile device platforms, but instead will have to support a variety of mobile platforms for which they will have to choose an approach that enables selected corporate applications while enforcing IT policies through management tools and capabilities. Organizations that do not support personal devices and fail to set and enforce policies will experience an increased number of security exposures and incidents.”

These tools are asking our workers to change the way in which they work, and the transparency with which they do that work. It is shifting business and leadership culture in ways enterprises have not seen in the past. It’s new. It’s scary. And it’s hard. And the part that’s hard is NOT the technology. The part that’s hard is the culture, the behaviors, the new skills we want workers to have innately.

Businesses are feeling the impact from employee social networking communication. Newly emerging issues surrounding social network communication, such as loss of intellectual property, compliance violations, and HR lawsuits, as well as productivity of the workforce all threaten the health of the business causing loss of revenue, reputation and potentially, customers. Corporations today are spending billions of dollars to mitigate such risks from email, instant messaging and other established methods of communication.

In a recent market research social networking related exposure incidents for US companies have increased to seventeen percent in 2009 from twelve percent in 2008, and is expected to continue to grow. In a separate market research, twenty four percent of the companies indicated that they have disciplined an employee for his or her activities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Guidelines and policy alone are not sufficient in eliminating the risks.

With proper planning it may be possible to take advantage of the new media’s strengths and mitigate the risks that your company will end up in the headlines.