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）