October 7, 2009 Going antisocial: More than half of businesses prohibit Twitter, Facebook Play video

(NECN: Ted McEnroe) - Social media marketers take note. It's getting harder to reach at least some of your customers at work on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. A new survey finds that more than half of American businesses have banned their employees from accessing social networking sites while at work.

The survey from the IT firm Robert Half Technology finds that 54% of companies have banned worker access to sites like Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace while at work. 19% say access is permitted for business use only, 16% allow limited personal use and just 10% say they aren't clamping down at all - yet.

The results aren't that surprising, but they are food for thought for companies that are trying to market to business people on social networks during the business day. Of course, while workplace use may be officially prohibited, people are still accessing sites during the day, and others are using their phones, personal laptops and lunch hours to log in, anyway.

A short time after Hotmail warned its users that thousands of users fell prey to a phishing scam that tricked them into giving up their Hotmail passwords, Google's GMail warns its customers that they aren't safe from scammers, either. The company has released

some gentle reminders that users need to protect their passwords and make them more secure. (And seriously, if your password is still "password", please, change it.) One interesting reminder - if your password recovery question has an easily guessable answer, you're just as vulnerable as if your password itself was something obvious.

And if you're one of the millions of people who use Skype to make phone calls over the Internet, you can now get out that iPhone. AT&T is bowing to pressure and allowing access to Skype and other Voice over IP (VoIP) applications on its 3G network. Previously, you could use Skype, but only if you had a wifi connection.

Don't forget we have another edition of "Ask the Experts" coming online tomorrow at 12:30pm. This week, it is sponsored by your New England Lincoln Mercury dealers, and the topic is innovation and technology in Lincoln Mercury, Ford and other cars. You can register at necn.com/asktheexperts, and then ask your questions in a safe environment about how all this new technology being packed into computers actually works - whether its Bluetooth, GPS, voice recognition or any other aspects of in-car technology you want to know more about. We've got a couple of top Lincoln Mercury tech experts to walk you through.

So we hope you'll go to necn.com/asktheexperts, sign up and submit your questions.