Social Networking As Business Tool: Still Early Days?

FaceTime, a vendor of security solutions, discovered — how surprising — that those in charge of IT decisions within businesses would like social networking to be secure. Yawn.

The other results are interesting, though:

[from FaceTime Survey: IT Managers OK Social Networking, as Long as it’s Secure and Compliant]

1. 30 percent would not consider a Web security platform that did not have the ability to secure and manage social networking and Web 2.0 applications
2. 32 percent said social networking is a critical business collaboration tool
3. 87 percent personally use social networks on the corporate network
4. 80 percent said information leakage is a primary concern with social networking use
5. 15 percent said social networking is “blocked” on the corporate network
6. 51 percent estimate that employees use social networks at work more than an hour per day

Only 32% see it as a critical business tool. I wonder what the numbers would be if you asked the employees that use these networks more than an hour a day?

These figures are also not consistent with Forrester research that Jeremiah Owyang cited in a recent interview at the Enterprise 2.0 blog. He said that a partner of his reported that social networking was the number one Web technology that surveyed managers reported putting into their 2009 IT plans.