Social media is a two-way street: Not only are staffers using it to communicate with friends and customers, organizations are finding it’s a must-have part of a marketing strategy.
However, increasingly people are accessing these sites through non-corporate approved devices.
That’s why Actiance Inc., which makes a unified communications security application for social media, has been extending the reach of its platform to mobile and other devices.
The company, formerly called FaceTime Communications, announced last week that its Socialite compliance software module now lets enterprises monitor Facebook group, fan and personal pages to prevent sensitive data from leaving the company on any device – including those running Android, Apple iOS, Symbian, HP webOS and RIM BlackBerry operating systems.
This follows announced protection for Linkedin and Twitter.
Coming later this year is wide device protection from YouTube users, said Sarah Carter, Actiance’s vice-president.
“Two hundred million people are accessing Facebook from their mobile device, from their smart phone, from an iPad,” she said in an interview.
The added capability of Socialite “really does expand the reach out and allows the organization to be secure in the knowledge the content’s being recorded” regardless of how people access a corporate Facebook site.
It’s accomplished by having corporate users install a small application on their Facebook profile page which lets the organization capture and archive data that flows through the site.
Socialite is centrally managed, so the organization can confirm the app has been installed – or uninstalled.
With some effort staffers can defeat the process, Carter said. However, most regulated industries make staff sign a code of conduct, which includes a promise to abide by corporate security policies.
Socialite is offered as a cloud service from Actiance, or as a separately-priced module that plugs into the company’s Unified Security Gateway. The gateway alone lets enterprises control access to 4,500 applications. Socialite is one of several modules that extend that control through Web filtering, anti-malware and anti-virus technologies.
Pricing for Socialite varies by the number of pages managed as well as whether its an on-premise or hosted solution. A managed service that covers up to 10 corporate fan pages with up to 10,000 fans costs US$15,600 a year. A hybrid hosted-on premise solution drops the cost to US$9,000 a year.
The company says five unnamed Canadian banks are among the uses of its applications.
Actiance says Socialite controls access to 150 different features in Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter, including data leak prevention, identity management across several social networks and access control.
It includes a library of banned words, which can be expanded by the organization.