In my frequent discussions with customers about the benefits of cloud archiving for regulatory, legal, and business reasons, I still find a large percentage that still don’t worry about archiving corporate social media content.
Some industries, such as the financial services and pharmaceutical industries, have specific regulatory retention requirements around how companies use social media for business purposes. For specifics on those regulations, you can check out the SEC, FINRA, and FDA sites. However, the point I am focusing on in this blog is that corporate social media archiving is not only driven by government regulations.
In many/most organizations, business critical and sensitive content generated by, and stored in both enterprise-grade and non-enterprise social media accounts is not being properly overseen, managed, archived, and retained. This exposes organizations to a variety of risks (besides regulatory liability) including an inability to place potentially responsive content on legal hold and the inability to find and produce information during eDiscovery.
Another major issue with unmanaged corporate social media activity is the fact that they can serve as an open door for IP theft, ransomware infiltration, and virus introduction. The key for organizations is to intelligently enable the use of social media platforms and gain from the productivity and other benefits they provide. However, being aware of, and protecting against the increased risk is paramount.