Facebook's evolution and impact on social media

¶ … company, organization, or government to be effective in their use of social networks, their efforts must be built on a foundation of accuracy, disclosure, and honesty. Social networks are shifting the balance of power away from organizations and towards the individual, the consumer and the voter (Bernoff, Li, 2008).

This is also having a profound impact on the privacy of personal information. Not only is the privacy of data a critical concern, the processes and procedures used for communicating data, information and knowledge are also changing. They are becoming more collaborative, open, and more measured by the results attained (McAfee, 2006). The flow and content of knowledge is also accelerating and becoming more aligned to the strategies of companies, breaking out of silos that often hindered entire company's ability to compete (Parise, 2009). In this onslaught of communications freedom, social networks in general and Facebook specifically are re-aligning the speed, use, and management of data, information, and knowledge within companies. It is the intent of this analysis to evaluate the implications of this for companies and organizations globally.

Social Networks and Privacy Is the New Battlefield

Facebook's lack of insight into privacy continues to be played out with every decision on the privacy settings they make (Wheaton, 2010). Ironically, the largest social networking site in the world is playing very loose with trust right now and losing credibility as a result. The bottom line is that for social networks to function correctly there must be trust pervading them (Bernoff, Li, 2008) (McAfee, 2006) (O'Reilly, 2006) (Vallor, 2010). In an era of extreme skepticism and cynicism, Facebook unilaterally changes privacy definitions and options, only to alienate many of the companies and organizations who have created applications on their platform. Trust is the currency that social networks trade with and gain their credibility and influence from (Bernoff, Li, 2008). Preserving and growing that trust is critical for any social networking site, company, organization, nation, or social network to prosper.

Organizations Need to Define Their Ethics and Knowledge Management Standards

Instead of allowing ethics to be defined by the social networking sites their companies use for recruiting (Prasad, 2009), marketing and sales (Bernoff, Li, 2008), or as the basis of enterprise-wide collaboration (McAfee, 2006) companies need to define their own ethics guidelines for social media use (Vallor, 2010). Often companies find that once these guidelines are in place their internal knowledge transfer and knowledge management attain higher levels of accuracy and efficiency (McAfee, 2006).