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'Social Sentry' Software Monitors Employees' Facebooking Habits

by Caleb Johnson on March 29, 2010 at 05:00 PM

Any company worth its salt has a social-media policy these days. But a new piece of software released by Teneros called Social Sentry allows employers to keep an even closer eye on how much time their workers spend on Facebook and Twitter.

According to The New York Times, the software costs a company between $2 and $8 per employee, depending on the size of the company and the level of scrutiny desired. Social Sentry will notify an employer whenever a worker publicly posts something to Facebook or Twitter. After that, it's up to the boss to decide what action to take, if any. By this summer, the software will also monitor YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn. Not only will it help an employer know what's being posted, but it'll also provide data about just how much time employees are spending on social networking sites.

It's an employer's legal right to monitor any public information related to an employee and to check on an employee's productivity, says Nancy Flynn, executive director of the ePolicy Institute. "You definitely want to take advantage of your legal right to monitor," she told the Times. But, if you ask us, social networking is still a little bit of a gray area. It could be compared to water-cooler talk, which is prevalent in any office but rarely leads to firings -- directly, anyway. But those two forms of communication are clearly not universally regarded as being the same, since people are often fired for things they post on such sites. The best thing to do is simply err on the side of caution, tighten up those privacy settings, and, while at work, leave Facebook alone. [From: The New York Times]

Tags: employment, facebook, jobs, monitoring, privacy, social sentry, SocialNetworking, SocialSentry, software, Teneros, top, twitter, Web, youtube

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