Expert speak: The privacy policy

New thinking in companies today has begun to examine the power of collaboration in social networking. This isn't just being looked at from the perspective of slotting available information into CRM and HRM systems, which may seem to be a natural progression, but also from the point of view of what is being called the "dis-intermediated" collaboration between people. Coined by Piers Fawkes, co-founder of the innovation consultancy firm PSFK, the term is a natural extension of peer production and collaborative consumption.

SAS, the integrated system of software products, is an early example of this, with plenty of web-based collaboration in place, including internal Wikis and about 600 intranet blogs. It decided to use www.socialcast.com to synergise these resources and link them to internal conversations. As one recent InformationWeek report states, "Socialcast is one of several products promising a Facebook-like experience... At the same time, these products need to provide more enterprise-specific functions like integration with a company's identity-management and document-management systems."

Potentially, this line of thought has a direct bearing on what one may think is the seemingly harmless posting and storing of information and other interactive behaviour on social networking sites. It doesn't need much of an imaginative leap to see companies directly requesting access to information that may already be stored on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg or any other similar sites.

While crowdsourcing as a term and practice is only now coming into its own, the idea has been around for a while. It's a path that organisations would increasingly evaluate to "bestsource" in a manner not possible before. On the other side of the same coin is collaborative consumption, which came into being in the really early days of e-commerce with auction sites where one could sell and buy used goods without having to be a merchant.

Sites such as www.panmind.com or www.yammer.com are already promoting private corporate and public shared spaces in various ways, though they are yet to gain much popularity and are at very early stages of adoption. Some of these offer easy user integration to other social networking sites by the use of Facebook or Twitter connect at the click of a button. Other companies are creating or have already started the basic roll out of their own social spaces with applications such as Microsoft SharePoint.

As an initial step, it's good to be wary that your information can be used even if it's shared with your permission. One can just imagine a "grant access" box popping up on one's Facebook page with an employer's app wanting to connect it to its information systems. So take care of what you say, do and store when you network online: your life actually may depend on it in more ways than you can imagine.

Madhuri Sen, MD - India, Waggener Edstrom Worldwide is a seasoned communications strategist consulting across sectorsusing the company's bespoke Integrated Influence model