Three in four businesses are concerned about employees misusing social networking tools and behaving irresponsibly, according to a survey of IT managers commissioned by legal enterprise search firm Recommind.

One possible consequence of that misbehaviour – information leakage and data breaches – worried 51% of respondents. Only 17% were troubled by the difficulty of preserving Web 2.0 communications for legal purposes, even though the law does not distinguish between email and social media communications, placing both under the banner of ‘electronic communication’.

A total of 42% of IT managers claimed to have banned the use of social media tools in the workplace altogether, perhaps unsurprisingly given that the IT department was overwhelmingly in charge of implementing and enforcing the company’s social networking policies (70%), followed by the legal department (17%).