Social media has long been a boon for the younger generation to stay in touch with friends and discover new things to do and try. However, in recent times, it has attracted increasing amounts of attention from businesses looking to generate more profits with minimal costs. In turn, social media usage is a skill employers will certainly examine when considering candidates.

Now, when saying social media, I’m not only referring to your standard social networking where you leave comments on friends walls and laugh at the occasional snapshot of the past weekend you have no memory of.

Rather, social media in the business world has three branches. In the hive-like environment of the Web 2.0 Expo media room in Manhattan’s Javits Center, filled with journalists phoning in information from the conferences, enjoying Starbucks and cookies or huddled around the router cables, typing away on their laptops, I had the chance to meet with Debra Lavoy, the Director of Product Marketing at OpenText, a company devoted to enterprise social media solutions.

There are three main divisions of corporate social media usage: creative, collective, and compounding. In order of mention, examples of the terms include: using shared and collaborative workspaces, watching trends and links using search engines and tools like TweetDeck.com, and reusing work that’s already been used via message boards. The candid and viral nature of social media also makes it a valuable asset for companies to branch out in such avenues to gather information on and attract new customers.

The main reason companies are branching out into social media is because it encourages discussion of a company and its products without having the company in control. Rather, the company can watch discussions between users,similar to how friends would recommend products to each other (i.e. ‘Did you hear about that awesome movie?’). Unlike the past however, the internet is significantly more viral than two friends conversing (e.g. the Facebook News Feed,) making it attractive for companies to embrace.

Although many companies have adopted traditional social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to enhance their businesses, it is important to note many companies approach social media with caution. This brings me to the focus of my interview with Debra — that in today’s day and age, you not only need to worry about your personal reputation, but also potentially your employer’s, depending on their policies on social media.

According to Debra, the internet has brought society back the idea of a small community mentality, where it is easier for people to see what their peers are doing, depending on the amount of content they post online. During my interview with Deborah, she further mentioned that in the past, companies were able to easily control how their companies were depicted. However with social media, the conversation and power are given to the mass population, which are ‘human’ and prone to mistakes, contrary to the prior ideal of the company maintaining a pristine reputation.

Social media contracts have caught on with businesses as a way to keep employees in check, by allowing employers to determine the actions of employees on social networks. In particular the controversy has caught up with some news outlets, which required their journalists to follow somewhat stringent codes of conduct, in order to prevent misrepresentation of the companies.

Ultimately, the key point from the interview is that companies need to realize that employees are human and are prone to mistakes. As one of my final questions, I asked whether it’s possible that in the future educators and employers will be more accepting of the ‘questionable’ content on social networks.

I was told, ‘Similar to how divorce is no longer scandalized in [my] generation, future employers will be more forgiving of the content on social networks.’ However, before you ‘ start posting those keg pictures on Facebook, keep in mind that acceptance has limits ‘- namely common sense — and Debra mentioned that future generations will need to be more sophisticated, to deal with the visibility of themselves in cyberspace.