Keeping your tweets

Social networking tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a growing variety of other Web 2.0 tools offer a number of benefits: they allow you to monitor trends among customers and prospects, they provide a vehicle for low-impact marketing, they can give your key people a presence as thought leaders or industry gurus, and they provide a channel to communicate with individuals that might not otherwise hear your message.

But these tools also have a number of downsides: every employee that tweets or posts or recommends using one of these tools becomes your company’s de facto spokesperson – whether you like it or not. An employee can inadvertently divulge confidential or sensitive information in violation of corporate policies, regulatory obligations or legal counsel’s advice. Plus, social networking tools carry with them a key problem that consumer-facing instant messaging clients have always had: as capabilities that users initiate, those users define their online moniker and how and when the tools are used.

There are a number of things that IT can do in response to the problems posed by social networking and other Web 2.0 tools:

• Block their use (good luck with that).
• Implement policies about acceptable use. This is a good and necessary first step, but it won’t solve much of the problem.
• Pre-review tweets and other postings. This provides IT with lots of control, but negates the timeliness of posts and requires enormous IT and/or compliance resources to manage properly.
• Implement lexicon-based or other policy management tools that will scan outbound content for violations. This is a useful approach, but can lead to false positives and it misses certain types of content, particularly whn usrs r tryng 2 stay under 140 chars.
• Archive all content that is sent to social networking sites. This is a good approach because it can capture all content and make it available for review, legal discovery and regulatory compliance audits, despite the fact that it does represent an extra expense for IT.

LiveOffice has just announced Social Archive, a solution designed to archive content from social networking sites. The solution archives this content and also makes it available for monitoring, discovery, audit and other purposes. This is a necessity in the financial services industry, particularly in light of FINRA’s Regulatory Notice 10-06 that defines the regulator’s position on the use of social networking tools by registered representatives and others. However, archiving social media content should also be a consideration by those in less regulated industries as a best practice to monitor for inadvertent data breaches and other communication that might not be considered acceptable according to corporate policies. It can also be useful for things like e-discovery, since there will be an increasing number of discovery efforts in the future that will require production of social networking content.