The typical large corporation experienced nine incidents related to social media over the past year, and they almost all suffered as a result, Symantec found in a recent survey.

Adverse impacts include the loss of confidential information, litigation and loss of reputation, reports Jennifer Lawinski at Baseline magazine. 

Enterprises generally have a handle on protecting content in email, instant messaging and spreadsheets, but they're still grappling with how to keep employees from leaking confidential data over Facebook.

Over the last year, the biggest difficulty companies faced with social media was employees over-sharing on public platforms, according to a poll of 1,225 IT professionals, conducted for Symantec by Applied Research.

The exposure or loss of confidential data resulted in real damage for 41 percent of the companies. More than one-third were confronted with greater exposure to litigation because of social media. The average litigation costs for companies that had social-media-related incidents came to $650,361. The cost of damaged reputation and customer mistrust averaged $638,496, while lost revenue averaged $619,360.

Perhaps most distressing for publicly-traded companies, those that ran into problems because of social media also experienced a drop in stock price.

For more:
- see Jennifer Lawinski's article at Baseline

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