As the Managing Director of an online marketing agency, you might expect me to be unreservedly enthusiastic about the possibilities of the Internet. I can certainly get very excited about what the intelligent use of the Internet can do for a business. But even if you don’t find the Internet inspiring, you’d have to admit that it is hard to manage without it if you want to stay competitive. For most people, the Internet no longer feels like something new. There’s a younger generation now already in work that has no memory of the day their company “went online”. Instead, for these people, the Internet is something they’ve grown up with and take for granted. This generation was sending emails almost as soon as it learned to read and write.

The Internet has changed people’s habits. People who would once have kept a diary now write a blog. Facebook and other social media sites have led to the creation of online communities. There is a vast pool of opinions and ideas from user generated content that companies now want to tap into as a way of gauging customer responses to their products. You don’t have to listen in to pub conversations to find out about what petrol-heads think about the new gearbox on the 1.6 GLS, because you can read their views on a forum site.

But employers know that not every new habit is a good habit to get into. Businesses know how easy it is for “checking something on the Internet” to become an excuse for aimlessly surfing the Internet in the company time. Employers want to hire staff with good computer skills, but they don’t want to hire someone who’s going to waste time on Facebook or instant messaging. It’s easy for someone to pretend he’s working if he’s typing something at the computer screen, but what he’s actually doing is as bad as chatting to a friend for hours on the phone. It’s just silent, so the offending behaviour is less obvious.

And there are more serious concerns than the damage this sort of thing does to productivity. The main one is the threat to security. Issues of commercial confidentially are especially important in a country like Britain, where increasingly information itself is the product. Businesses are becoming more and more worried about employees revealing commercially sensitive information, whether in emails, or, worse still, on social media sites, where many more people can read it.

None of this is to suggest that social media is a bad thing, or that we should get busy trying to put a stop to it. Because, obviously, you can’t. It would be as self-defeating as trying to squeeze the toothpaste back into the tube. Instead, from a business perspective, it’s more sensible to embrace the potential of social media. Social media sites allow for market research using comments that are unprompted. And businesses can access an online audience of potential customers through their blogs. If the Internet has brought with it some new challenges, it also offers the employer new opportunities as well. Provided a business knows how to protect itself from the risk, most companies can still benefit from embracing the opportunities they represent.