The Social Side of Information Governance
At the end of the day, capturing social media is a distinct technical challenge, though merely capturing it for the sake of collecting it has limited value. Similar to when email became required from a regulatory perspective and organizations worried about storing it somewhere to meet their obligation, social media is at a comparable stage. However, if we examine certain insider-trading cases, and some of the legal cases noted earlier, it is clear that regulators are focused less on the form a piece of information takes—they care far more about what it actually means. Therefore, the right solution for managing social media will allow a business to not only monitor and collect it, but categorize and manage it in real time according to established policies.
Best Practice #4: Focus on solutions that can establish what something means, and understand how it relates to potential risk for an organization. Capturing all interactions provides limited value, as it only creates more content to govern. Where information professionals can derive value is in mitigating risk and identifying insights in interactions to increase customer service or promote products. Given the volume of interactions, their brevity (think a 140-character Tweet) and complexity (audio and video), solutions must be able to find relevant patterns and relationships in the information to take action. Understanding the meaning of social media interactions is more important than simply capturing whatever someone can create.
Social media presents unique opportunities for all organizations, even the most tightly regulated or highly litigated. As it evolves, social media only becomes more pervasive, creating new methods for interacting with a variety of audiences. At the same time, social media interactions present unique risk, requiring organizations to develop governance models mindful of legal and regulatory guidelines. This new understanding also creates obligations, while prohibiting or limiting some types of conduct. More importantly, information professionals must look beyond the ability to capture interactions, and instead focus on what it all means.
A Snapshot of 2012 Social Media Usage Statistics
- 65% of the world's top companies have an active Twitter profile.
- 23% of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog.
- 58% of Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate Facebook account.
- Facebook has 901 million monthly active users.
- Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, sending 340 million tweets every day.
Autonomy, an HP company, is a global leader in software that processes human information, or unstructured data, including social media, email, video, audio, text, Web pages and more. Autonomy also offers information governance solutions in areas such as e-discovery, content management and compliance, as well as Web content management, online marketing optimization and rich media management. Please visit http://protect.autonomy.com to find out more.
1 Gartner newsroom.
2 Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc.
3 George L Paul and J.R. Baron, Information Inflation: Can the Legal System Cope?