Social Media Archiving

“Every firm that intends to communicate, or permit its associated persons to communicate through social media sites must first ensure that it can retain records of those communications.”

– FINRA Regulatory Notice (January 2010)

I cannot comment on a regulatory policy of USA, IANAL and I am an alien to boot. But this sure adds a layer in the social media communications that makes the businesses slightly slower to adopt/use. What the above means is that we have been ignoring the specific needs of the various regulated industries in Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, etc.

We now need to not only monitor the social media or have CoTweet/Hootsuite kind of tools, but also be able to provide archiving solutions for the communications happening via social media. Audit Trails from a programmatic perspective & archiving from a infrastructure perspective. Kind of makes sense why Dell claims that 90% of data saved by enterprises are not read again! ;)

However, we do not need to archive each & every tweet or friending happening on the social web, just those that emanate from the company & its people as its employees (am still not clear if an employee can use their personal account for personal reasons without having to archive).

Some vendors have cropped up to take advantage of this situation and the ensuing FUD:

• http://www.advisormail.com/social-media-archiving.asp
• http://compass.socialware.com/
• http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/LiveOffice-Socialware-Partner-Offer-Enhanced-Social-Media-Archiving-Compliance-1289404.htm

Social Media Archiving is not an optional need in BFS, yet the current options (AFAIK) are cloud based (SaaS) offerings and BFS might not be ready for it yet. I am not aware of the complete industry, but the few biggies that I do know of, would not like to put such communications data into the cloud.

You can listen in to this podcast on guidance on the use of blogs and social networking sites for business communications.