Managing Information Risk and Archiving Social Media

http://ow.ly/6Hyfo

An article by Ben Kerschberg on Forbes.com

This article discusses the recent survey by Symantec, and also addresses the rise in requests for production of electronically stored information from social media networks.  As the article discusses, "Social media has changed the face of business. Whether in product marketing, consumer branding, customer relations, and/or human resources, the benefits of corporate social media are beyond dispute. Yet mounting evidence shows that the risks are, too. Last week, Symantec released the results of an independent survey of 2,000 global enterprises across a variety of industries with a minimum of 1,000 employees. (Symantec confirmed that “[t]he respondents do not represent any kind of grouping of former or current Symantec customers.”) The survey results speak to the heterogeneous nature of the types of electronically stored information (“ESI”) stored during legal proceedings. See Evan Koblentz, Symantec: Files, Databases Overtake Email in E-Discovery, Law Technology News (Sept. 19, 2011)."

The article goes on to discuss the plans to implement social media policies, "Only 30% of corporate respondents identified themselves as either having discussed or being in the process of discussing such a plan, with an additional 14% stating that they neither had nor intended to create such a plan."

The article goes on to address the need for policies to regulate, and also to archive social media ESI.  "Corporate giants such as Coke and IBM have posted their own policies online and can be the starting point for a solid, tailored policy. Yet creating a clear, defensible and enforced social media policy is just the start.

Current case law leaves little doubt that social media is discoverable in litigation. This raises the obvious question: How can companies archive social media the way they do email so that they can answer such requests? There are serious challenges to doing so properly."


P.S.  If you are interested in creating a policy to regulate social media use, please see Joe Bartolo's article at the link provided below, the conclusion of this article provides a link to a site with over 230 different corporate policies that are actually in use presently:

http://www.litigationsupporttechnologyandnews.com/2011/09/social-media-in-workplace-regulating.html