Social media mishaps cost firms $4 million in 2010.

• Position: SOCIAL MEDIA

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An April 2011 Symantec flash poll of 1,225 IT executives in 33 countries found that the typical organization experienced nine social media incidents during the previous year including employees posting confidential information publicly--that cost businesses an average of $4.3 million. Ninety-four percent suffered negative consequences, such as damage to their reputations, loss of customer trust, data loss, and lost revenue.

Symantec said it's more important than ever for organizations to put controls in place to capture social media information to ensure compliance with open records requests, industry regulations, and e-discovery requests.

"Businesses know how important it is to protect and preserve e-mail, IM, spreadsheets, and other unstructured information. Now they need to recognize that information flowing through social networks is equally important," said Greg Muscarella, senior director of product management at Symantec.

According to Gartner, by 2013, half of all companies will have been asked to produce content from social media websites for e-discovery. Social media e-discovery precedent is "a patchwork," Gartner said, and there's no reason to expect "clear guidance from courts or regulators in the near future."

Gartner analyst Debra Logan warned, "In e-discovery, there is no difference between social media and electronic or even paper artifacts. The phrase to remember is 'if it exists, it is discoverable."'

The Symantec poll found that 82% of organizations are at least discussing implementing archiving solutions to collect, preserve, and discover sensitive business information transmitted through social media, along with establishing social media usage policies and employee training programs. However, less than one-fourth have actually implemented such technologies and plans.

According to Symantec, the top-three social media incidents the typical organization experienced during the year previous to the poll year were:

* Employees sharing too much information in public forums (46%)

* The loss or exposure of confidential information (41%)

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