In the past, I’ve been known to instruct companies to block all employees from social media. Times are changing.

The fact is, Facebook is now the second most popular site on the Internet, second only to Google. We have to understand that some of our employees can actually be performing useful work using social media.

To me, one of the most shocking facts is that companies do not control their Internet access. There are wonderful web tools out there that will allow you to:

• Track who’s going to what sites
• Log employee activity in case you ever need evidence in a lawsuit
• Selectively block groups and/or individual users from accessing specific categories of sites

I find that the main reason companies do not use these tools is that the blocking scenario makes executives choose between yes to allow or no to block. Deciding between yes and no is easy when you’re thinking about some categories of sites. But there will always be several sites that are difficult to come to agreement about.

In order to get over the hump, it is important to start blocking the sites that everyone can agree to block. And if you have final say at your company, then you can decide which site you want to block. The point is, if you can’t decide on specific categories, you don’t have to block them right now. Just by setting up these tools, they increase your security. More and more websites are being infected with malware and that can result with you and your users becoming infected to something known as a drive-by download. These tools will do their very best to protect you from drive-by downloads.

Contact your IT department today and ask them to enable Internet blocking, logging, and tracking.

Please post your comments on this blog.