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Social networking is hot, as is just about anything else connected with the Internet. And all these various online tools are changing the way tax and accounting professionals work. To call anything a year of is always a bit pretentious. But for this part of the world, 2009 is the first year in which a substantial part of the public tax and accounting market is paying attention to social networking and to anything that remotely resembles Software as a Service. 

But there are a lot of mixed messages. Individuals are flocking to sites like Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook, easily the three most popular networking platforms. Advice abounds on how to use these for business and companies and firms alike are setting up pages and groups within these platforms. At the same time, Robert Half Technology found recently that fifty-four percent of 1,400 companies surveyed have a ban on use of such sites during company hours.

Now these are companies that employ more than 100 people each and which have chief information officers who are more likely to have strict policies than are small- and midsize accounting firms. And companies with a lot of workers bees may not see the value of having the hive swarming the Web. Firms with lots of professionals probably worry less about this. Still, there a lot of people out there who are nervous about what workers are doing on the Web.

There will always be those who abuse the system by chatting all day with their friends. But didn't they manage to do that with telephones and newspapers? However, simply reacting from fear of what might go wrong is no way to run a business. Besides, there's just no stopping social media, anymore than there was any stopping the PC, probably opposed by the generation of technology executives that were in their jobs when that technology first came into corporate America via the back door.

No, the best response is to have policies and to have a work force that has a clear understanding of what those means. But that also means that management must have a knowledge of how social media works and to understand that there is great business value when used correctly.

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