Online social networking security discussion for business.

The benefit of social networking is a lot.

Businesses are embracing the social networking to foster an active internal culture of collaboration, the free flow of information make employes feel valued, connected as an important part of the community which enhance the productivity. Outside the organization,  Businesses take advantage of online social networking to reach the customers, improve customer experience and do a more effective advertising campaign. Many companies patrol social networking websites to listen the voice about their products or services. When a business's reputation is threatened, social networking platform seems to be the most effective channel for moving the discussion to the right direction.

The security issues of online social networking environment organizations confront.

But why we consider social network might threaten the business? As you have seen, with the convenience of social networking/media, internal staff may easily leak important information (e.g. intellectual property, critical business information of the organization) to the web. Some online criminals could access sensitive data by malicious injection/penetration(e.g. cookie spoofing) that connect to the social networking platforms of targeted victims.  During the first half of 2009, 19 percent of all Internet attacks targeted social networking sites. This represented a dramatic increase over previous years, according to a study by Breach Security Inc.

Cyber attackers are usually dangerously effective because they are mostly technology savvy, they generate attractive but fraudulent message that appears to come from the trusted party like your friends and entice the unsuspecting users to click, directing them to phishing websites or sites employing malicious code/software with the intention to obtain their sensitive personal data.


Data leakage sometimes involve the violation of confidentiality mandates. A simple example it that it is not uncommon phenomenon for medical school students expose patient's sensitive information via social networking platforms, sharing their "practicum experience".

How can organizations balance online social networking and security?

There is no doubt that it must set up policies to govern the usage of social network sites and internal information, and it also must use technology to protect the integrity and confidentiality of sensitive data. These approaches require teamwork between the business and technology sides to make out an integrated security strategy that balances employee's education with sophisticated network monitoring and data protection. Possible strategies like content filtering, data loss prevention with regular back up and multiple layers security control at the gateway should be effective to reduce the potential security risks.

Social Network Analysis case study

What is social network analysis (SNA)?

SNA is a method/process for studying the relationships between actors which include people, groups, organizations and any other information processing network members. Through SNA, we can extract the connection information between different nodes in order to figure out how can we make best use of social network to create value.

 

1.  Undirected case

For the given social network, we could easily make out various features for analysis consideration. This social network formed by 5 student with Degree Centrality given (L = 6, g = 5) .The Density of this social network is 2L/g(g-1) = 0.6.

 

 

Network Matrix

	Alice	Bob	Carol	David	Eva
Alice	-	1	1	1	-
Bob	1	-	-	1	-
Carol	1	-	-	1	-
David	1	1	1	-	1
Eva	-	-	-	1	-

Centrality analysis

Group Degree Centralization:

    

If the geodesic distances are given, we could further analyze the ‘Closeness’ and ‘Betweenness’ properties.

2.   Directed case

There is no doubt we can easily find out David is the key player in this network on the 
undirected basis. But how about directed case?

  

Centrality analysis:

From the outgoing perspective, David is the most influential actor. The Degree Centrality of each student is illustrated below

	C'D
Alice	0.25
Bob	0.25
Carol	0.25
David	1
Eva	0.25

Prestige analysis:

On the other hand, the Degree Prestige considers the incoming direction and obviously Alice is the most prestigious actor in this social network.

Degree Prestige

	P'D
Alice	0.75
Bob	0.25
Carol	0.5
David	0.25
Eva	0.25

Distance Matrix

	Alice	Bob	Carol	David	Eva
Alice	0	0	1	0	0
Bob	1	0	2	0	0
Carol	1	0	0	0	0
David	1	1	1	0	1
Eva	2	2	2	1	0

Based on the distance relationship table, we can calculate the Proximity Prestige which considers how close all actors are to the particular actors. Standardized Proximity Prestige equation is

Proximity Prestige table

	Pp
Alice	0.8
Bob	0.33
Carol	0.67
David	0.25
Eva	0.25

The proximity has the same properties as the actor closeness centrality index. When all actors are adjacent to point i, its proximity prestige should be 1. While if point i is isolated, the result should equal to 0. Here Alice own the highest proximity prestige, so she is the most prestige person in this social network.

What social media bring along to us?

Preface

The web 2.0 technology brings out the explosion of social media that transfers people from traditional content readers to publishers. Social media do change the way to do traditional marketing, the so called online marketing which I had not realized before the lecture.

Social media marketing is enabled by information sharing. Such is human nature, when people discover some piece of content like sale promotion in the shopping plaza, concert tickets for sale, the new of exhibition etc., they would like to recommend it to their friends on Facebook and Twitter.

The significance of social networking/media to business.

From the merchant’s perspective, social media platform is a new place to do the market analysis and advertise themselves. As we all know, the E-commerce have already walled into the life of the public, so the exploration of business opportunities is not the problem for many companies. While how to leverage the internet resources to rapidly enhance the popularity and market presence is the most significant topic for them to think about.

1.Social networking to marketing analysis

Online marketing analysis is some kinds of users' preference or opinion study. In reality, it is not uncommon that merchants or E-commerce  websites to make some recommendations to their customers based on their consumption history/preference. 

But how about the users' opinion analysis? It involves web/text mining topic. For instance, as a major player in the mobile phone market, a good way for Samsung to do the marketing analysis is to accumulate and analyze the user comment of its product as well as those of Apple, HTC, and Motorola from online questionnaires, forums, E-commerce websites and even Facebook. This cost is lower compared to traditional marketing analysis and it is also easier and more effective to get the comparable viewpoints from the common users.

2. Social media to online marketing

The cost of traditional advertisement methods like TV commercials, outside billboards sometimes is quite high. Now the social media give merchants a new choice to expose themselves online (e.g. Google Buzz, Google Wave, YouTube, Facebook, etc.). The direct social recommendations using dialog transformation style (one to/or many to many) should be more effective to make the advertisement message arrive at the potential or target customers.

 （Facebook seems to be a popular place to do online advertisement）

Deeper understanding of Social Networking

Social networking platform change the way of communication before.

Talking about social networking, I used to physically link this concept with developing relationship with friends and it is popular online due to the widespread use of Facebook and Twitter/Weibo which change the information distribution from 'one-to-one' to 'one-to-many'. Without the Facebook, how could the 'Jasmine Revolution' and the 'Occupy Wall Street' propagate to the rest of the world in a minute.

After taking the course of Social Networking for the first three weeks, I realize the online social networking demonstration is far more than 'talking' or sharing pictures with friends on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other platforms with similar characteristics. It  involves the knowledge generation from the interactive and constructive communication that can create more value for the human being.

But how could 'social networking' bring along such a great value? After learning the social and cognition theory, I figure out how it make things happen. Actually, a great amount of online communities like MSDN which group professionals together and provide a social environment for participants to discuss about topics and exchange ideas other than developing social relationship.

How social networking generate knowledge?(e.g. wiki)

The word 'wiki' was first introduced in my internship project experienced in the undergraduate period. Back then, we had no idea of what was the difference between wiki and those traditional forums. We posted the development problems on the internal wiki platform to ask for help and tried to answers others' questions if we could. Now I realize that this is how we learn and get information and even knowledge. After digesting the useful data we gathered, we brainstormed online and shared useful tips to others. One could update the information when he/she encounters the similar problems with better solutions. This iterative process lead cognition level to meta-cognition and epistemic cognition, creating new ideas and new knowledge in people's mind unconsciously.

Wikipedia, as the most successful free knowledge sharing platform, is a typical example to demonstrate how social networking environment brings knowledge to people. Every time when a participant search some key words of what kind of subjects and read the articles of Wikipedia, the first level(Cognition) is involved. After getting to know something, he/she could take some notes and make a rating for the pages which achieve the second level(Metacognition). Base on the learning process and the information he/she absorb, if the participant was inspired to reach some knowledge advancement that could make a new post or improve the existing articles for benefiting others, it would arrive at the Epistemic Cognition level, the highest one in the cognition hierarchy.

Something to share & discuss:

Wikipedia blacked out its site at 18th of Jan. to protest against legislation of 'Stop Online Piracy and Protect Intellectual Property Acts' in the US congress. People afraid the legislation would give US government the power to censor the internet using the technical approaches like the ways China, Iran do. This incident aroused a big controversy on the internet because hundreds of thousands of people especially students who get used to find information on this online encyclopedia and they can't imagine the world without the this free knowledge sharing platform. The site urges Wikipedia readers in the US to contact their local congressman to vote against the bills. Whether you agree or not. The online social networking platform do exert an incredible impact on the world we live.