In my mission to complete this Capstone project I asked the question, what could possibly happen if individuals used social media at work?  What are the most major benefits and what are some of the drawbacks; I answered those questions but needed to go further into what attacks and information leakage could do to a business.  We have heard the stories of the hacker group ‘anonymous’ getting into the networks of government entities and large companies as well as military personnel leaking top-secret information to Wikileaks so I wanted to go a little further into the types of attacks and the potential harm it could do to servers and networks of an organization.  I also looked at the aspect of searching for work in the world of social media which can help individuals land a job they want by presenting all their skills in a clean digital format or get automatically rejected due to a tagged picture on Facebook of someone acting in a way that is not in compliance with the company’s values. 

The challenges that I faced on trying to research this topic is that amazingly there is not many peer-reviewed research studies done on social media in the workplace, yet there are so many news articles and company documents in either PDF and PowerPoint presentations available on the Internet.  Apparently, many companies are trying to meet the challenge of dealing with social media in the workplace and how they can use it to their advantage.   I believe that since Web 2.0 is a concept that has evolved so quickly and is converging with old technologies like televisions and phones, it appears that academic scholars have had little chance to actually perform any scientific studies on social media usage in the workplace.  

I learned to pay more attention to certain things that I do on my computer at work and at home.  I am aware that at my place of employment, I signed a consent that basically says that I can be dismissed for doing anything that does comply with the organizations standards on the company owned computers and other devices. Where I work social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are blocked from usage, the only social networking site that is not blocked for now is LinkedIn.   Social networking sites serve no purpose at my organization and they are not really looking for a #brand (yes the # sign was put there on purpose).  My habits while using the Internet at work have changed a bit, I considered my endless Google searching as treading lightly but I have cutback searching even further and make sure to keep my page on the Google-News section.  That is one of the widely unspoken exceptions of using the Internet at my job strangely enough.  I am also trying to make my friends more acutely aware of the pitfalls of “friending” co-workers and supervisors on Facebook.  I have used news links from my references in order to educate those who may not aware of situations that are related to the hazards of venting their frustration about work on Facebook.  Now when it comes to the social networking site LinkedIn I now have a profile thanks to Shannon Gallo of SPS and I have managed to persuade a friends and few former co-workers to create a profile and add me as a contact so that I can create my own network of professionals and get recommendations from them without ever having to create a Word or PDF document.  

I think that this form of media is here to stay but it will evolve way beyond just Facebook and Twitter which is what the general public thinks social media is all about.  We who live outside of the technology field should learn the ins and outs of Web 2.0 but should not solely live for it.