Global IT consultancy Gartner on Monday called up on the social media sites to provide a mechanism for "verifying the identity of employees, job candidates and customers".

"Organisations should not ignore social media and social identity. We recommend that organisations ascertain how they currently use internal and external social media in both official and unofficial ways, and look for dissonance between identity and access management practices and identity needs, opportunities and risks of social media," Gartner vice-president for research Andrew Walls said in a report.

"Organisations need to turn their attention to the impact of social media on identity and access management," Gartner has also recommended organisations to ascertain how their employees use internal and external social media in "both official and unofficial ways," instead of blocking access to such websites.

The report also expressed the hope that only less than 30 percent of large organisations will block their employees access to social media sites by 2014, compared to 50 percent in 2010.

According to Gartner, collection of identity data by public social media "on a massive scale," enables improvements in "the production of identity intelligence."

"This pushes identity and access management programmes to discover user profiles accessed by staff and to maintain capabilities for accessing external services in order to harvest identity data," he said/

Such identity intelligence can be leveraged for identity and access management of employees, says the report.

Gartner has also identified significant impact of social media on identity and access management.

"Employees who participate in online social media continually make judgements about the degree of trust they should place in the platforms and in other participants, and they adjust content, structure and vocabulary to match their risk assessments," it said.