The dangers of adapting social media

Let's say your company is a bus on a challenging road. Social media is new, it’s changing fast and nobody has the full picture of where it’s going. There is a high degree of causal ambiguity (the reason for an outcome is be ten different things and it's hard to separate that one reason labeled social media). So if your bus goes faster or breaks down there are a number of things that can cause this, it's impossible to measure impact of one part in the bus's engine. In other words; it's hard to measure whether your company is benefiting from the implementation of social media. One of managements early worries were a reduction in productivity. So your bus might stop as the passengers want to take in the view, but your progress to your destination is delayed, it's so frustrating. The managers feared that their employees would sit around all day and be social for the fun of it. There is also the issue of sharing the wrong information. Your employees suddenly get the ears of your environment whether you like it or not and they could spill some of your secret sauce for you competitors to find and copy. You no longer have control of the bus windows, anybody can open them and shout out. This might be the biggest issue, because adapting social media can backfire and hurt your company. Six out of 10 organizations suffered large losses averaging $2 million each because of security incidents as a cause of social media usage during the past year(McAfee, 2010).  This number was based on a survey of more than 1,000 organizational decision makers from 17 countries, and in-depth interviews with experts. McAfee doesn't tell us which companies it chose to participate, and they are selling protections from ordeals like this, so don't swallow the number like a raw mussel (you might get stomach ache if it's a bad number).


So social media includes problems and trapdoors and  show stoppers. It's a dangerous road tour bus is heading down. How can a company mend this? The to latter issues are internally based and can be solved through strong corporate values and a good internal policy. Add some media training to this package and you've come a long way. Causal ambiguity is solved by measuring the outcome of implementing social media right. This is a field of expertise in itself. A field I'm not  currently well versed in, do you have any good ideas here?