Almost 25% of employees have disciplined workers for activities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, according to a recent survey by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE). Despite that, only half of companies said they have a social networking policy or monitor employees’ behavior.

The dangers of social networking misuse include:

1. damage to the company’s reputation
2. leak of confidential information, and
3. harassment (if an employee talks disparagingly about a co-worker, for example).

What does a good policy look like? It should cover two basic elements:

1. Make it clear that employees have no right to privacy when they post on a public social-networking site, no matter where they connect from. If it’s on the site and can be read, it can be used as grounds for discipline.
2. Remind employees that company policies (like anti-harassment) extend to online behavior.

Does your company have a social networking policy? What does it cover? Let use know in the comments section below.

Companies have caught workers’ comp cheats and employees who play hooky by finding the truth on the workers’ Facebook and MySpace pages.

And now, British police are trying do the same with an escaped convict.

Craig “Lazie” Lynch was serving a seven-year burglary sentence in a low-security prison near Suffolk, England. He escaped in the fall of 2009.

Shortly after, he started using his Facebook page to taunt police. He also offered info about his planned whereabouts, confident he’d remain a fugitive.

Facebook shut the page down after it attracted a number of followers.

Lynch was recently caught by police, tthe Times Online reports. Authorities had been working with Facebook to get information about where he’d been posting from.

Software company Appirio has released an application called MyFriends@Work, which aims to help companies find prospective workers via current employees networks.

Here’s how it works:

The company asks employees to add the application to their Facebook pages. The tool notifies them when the company’s looking to hire and, using information pulled from their friends’ profiles, makes a list of their contacts that might be the right fit.

Appirio’s matching engine uses info like geographic location, job titles and education details to come up with the matches. Employees can use MyFriends@Work to send referrals over Facebook, and employers can use it to track which employees referred new hires.

To allay privacy concerns, Appirio says it only provides the list matches to the employee and doesn’t let employers access information that’s been marked as “private” on Facebook.

To learn more, click here.

There’s also the question of whether the employees will be comfortable with a boss’s friend request.

So what should managers do? HRMorning readers had a lot to say on the subject, commenting on the recent story “Warning to bosses: Don’t ‘friend’ employees“:

AAS: “The only winning move is not to play.” This is true for employees and managers. Ask the police officers in Lexington KY who were fired for posting improperly on MySpace as well as hundreds of other examples of how we as a society have become far too open online. It is far more complex than just friending someone, it has to do with the social fabric of our businesses, and our employees’ day-to-day lives.

Mary D.: I accepted friend requests from co-workers and subordinates. Then one day, a coworker was telling an outside-the-company friend of hers about a new benefit that had not yet been announced. Since she too had many employees as friends, as well as me who knew about the benefit, half the company was alerted and the confusion started. Since then I have cleaned up my Facebook page to friends and family.

Jilly: I worked side by side with my staff for two years, as line staff with them. Then I got promoted to manager. Am I not supposed to be friends with them now? I feel by cutting all ties as friends would cause me bigger problems in the long run with my staff.

Tiffany: I am a supervisor who has friended subordinates and also have been friended by my supervisor on Facebook. The person receiving a friend request does have to accept the request in order for it to be finalized, but what does it say to your boss if you refuse their friend request?

What’s your opinion?

Dana Hanna, a computer programmer from Maryland, recently got married. While at the altar, he added a new step to the ceremony — he pulled out his cell phone to post an update on Twitter. Hanna wrote:

“Standing at the altar with @TracyPage where just a second ago she became my wife! Gotta go, time to kiss my bride.”

He also managed to add an update to Facebook, and had his new wife’s phone ready so she could do the same.

Hanna says the interruption, which was a surprise to the bride, was done both for fun and practicality: “I have a lot of family scattered around the country and we all use Facebook a lot to keep in touch,” he wrote to caption a YouTube video of the ceremony.

Coming across a public confession on the Internet.

Several companies have recently used info found on sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn to fight fraudulent workers’ compensation claims.

Sometimes, employees will blatantly brag about fooling companies. More often, though, they’ll describe strenuous activities they’ve recently participated in (playing sports, for example) while they’re supposedly too injured to work. For example:

• A Los Angeles-area warehouse worker filed a work-related back injury claim — but then posted on Facebook about bowling tournaments he’d competed in, after the injury.
• Dollar Tree had paid out over $100,000 over a year and a half to an employee with back problems. Her MySpace page listed a side job as a wedding photographer. Suspicious, the company sent representatives to conduct surveillance, and the employee was spotted lugging heavy camera equipment with no signs of back pain.
• Claims investigation service GlobalOptions Group even reports finding an employee who posted videos of himself competing in a rodeo while he was supposedly too injured to get out of bed.

Nathalie Blanchard, 29, was on leave from her job at IBM in Bromont, Quebec, for a year and a half after being diagnosed with depression. Now she’s fighting to get her benefits reinstated after her employer’s insurance company, Manulife, cut them after conducting an investigation using Facebook.

What happened?

The insurance company spotted several pictures Blanchard had posted on Facebook of her having fun at a Chippendale’s bar show, at her birthday party and on the beach — all taken while she was out on leave. The company said that was evidence she was no longer depressed.

Blanchard said she was acting on her doctor’s advice to try and have fun by going out with friends and taking a short getaway. She said she even notified the insurance company that she’d be taking a trip.

But it didn’t matter. The insurance company deemed she was fit to return to work and cut her benefits.

Was the company right to cut Blanchard’s benefits? Let us know what you think in the Comments Box below.

Are your managers concerned employees are wasting too much time on Facebook and Twitter? Well, they might have something bigger to worry about.

The popularity of social-networking sites is growing more rapidly than ever. According to the latest figures, about half of adults have a Facebook and/or Myspace account, and the number of Twitter users has grown by 1,300% in the past year.

So odds are a good amount of people in your company are logging on to those sites fairly often. Though some employees probably waste part of the work day checking their accounts, most experts say those situations should be dealt with like any other performance problem — on a case-by-case basis.

The real problem, they warn, is the potential damage to the company’s reputation and its bottom line.

According to a recent Deloitte survey, 74% of workers admitted that social networking sites make it “easier” to hurt an employer’s reputation. That’s a fact several companies already know. For example:

• Last year, British Airways fired a group of employees who used Facebook to call the airline’s passengers “fat and smelly”
• A Pennsylvania high school recently fired a teacher for, among other things, bragging about her alcohol use on Myspace. She sued for freedom of speech, but her case was tossed because she had no right to speech that made the school look bad.

To keep the risk at bay, attorney Keisha-Ann Gray, writing in Human Resource Executive, recommends drafting a policy that:

• Reminds employees they have no expectation of privacy when they use the Internet at work
• Prohibits employees from using the Web in any way that’s contrary to the company’s interests, whether done at work or at home, and
• Establishes that other company policies (anti-harassment, confidentiality, etc.) apply to what employees do online.

What you can’t do

Some states have laws that can limit the reach of a company’s social networking policy. For example, states like New York, Colorado and North Dakota have laws prohibiting companies from firing employees for legal activities they partake in outside of work.

However, most of laws make an exception when the employer is directly affected by the employee’s actions. Check your state laws to be safe before drafting a policy.

It’s the later, says attorney Michael Schmidt in the National Law Journal.

A few reasons he and other lawyers recommend against it:

1. Many employees think its creepy — in a recent survey by Office Team, 47% of employees said they don’t like seeing a friend request from their boss. Sure, that’s less than half, but it’s probably not worth the risk of really bothering a good performer.
2. It smacks of favoritism — If anyone doesn’t get a friend request from the boss, that’s not going to look good.
3. Managers could learn too much about their employees — which could come back to haunt the company.

Say an employee lists membership in a religious organization on her Facebook page and is friended by her boss. Later, she’s fired for poor performance. Now, she could have a chance to argue her boss fired her because he learned about her religious affiliation.

Other kinds of info managers could find out: sexual orientation, medical problems and political affiliation, all of which could theoretically form the basis for a lawsuit.

According to the Office Team survey, 48% of managers are uncomfortable being online friends with subordinates. Just as well, many lawyers say — they’re better off not doing it, anyway.

The practice of “friending” on social-networking sites can be a legally dangerous one when it involves a supervisor and a subordinate. Plus, a lot of subordinates think it’s creepy.

The seemingly innocent practice of  sending friend requests to staff via Facebook, Twitter and other sites can trigger a slew of legal claims, including harassment, discrimination or wrongful termination, as well as touch off complaints of favoritism if the boss friends only a select person or persons.

That’s the warning from attorney Michael Schmidt on law.com.

Here’s the source of the problem: Social-networking sites typically are packed with personal information. So, what happens if a friending boss learns TMI — too much info — about a subordinate? That opens the door for an employee complaint that the boss made work decisions, such as promotions, based on the personal information.

The example given by Schmidt:

• Suppose an employee is a member of a gay-rights group.
• Then suppose the friending boss fires the employee because of performance issues.
• The employee then could argue that the boss used the personal information as a basis for the termination.

That’s just one example of many: religious affiliation, age,  political affiliation, health problems. All could serve as a basis for a lawsuit should the supervisor take an adverse action against the employee.

If that’s not enough, consider that in a survey by staffing firm Office Team, 47% of respondents said they don’t want to be friended by their bosses.

The message to supervisors: Don’t do it.