What about the darker side of social media.......

......how can IT professionals tackle the cyber attackers and spammers that will no doubt set their sights on this technology?

According to predictions from Kaspersky Lab, in the coming months there will be a surge in the number of spamming linked to new social networking sites such as Google+.

This follows a 'significant increase' in the amount of phishing attacks on Facebook in June this year, putting the social networking site third on the hit list of cyber attacks, behind eBay and PayPal.

"It is nothing new - we have seen it before and I think we see with anything where there is a huge amount of public interest, for example, when there's the release of a new iPhone, it is also massively abused by spam," explained Rik Ferguson, director of security, research and communication at Trend Micro.

Anything where there is unlimited availability and huge public interest is something that will encourage spam.

In years to come [social media] will be the dominant platform, without question.  That is where the communication preferences are moving for users anyway - if you talk to anybody under the age of 25, email is almost certainly going to be their secondary or maybe even their third preferred form of communication.

Criminals follow the behaviour of consumers and if consumers are moving, as they are, to those alternate platforms, that is where the criminals will go.

So how do we tackle this? Well - that is up to you, the IT professionals.

You can see there is plenty of scope to make your name in the IT industry if you can show you have got your head around social media, as as many people use it personally, then you have got every change of making a career out of something you enjoy doing.