Best practices for governing social media content.

• Author: Phillips, John T.
• Position: TECH TRENDS

The personal and professional use of social media is continuing to proliferate in homes and enterprises including across international boundaries. According to the Statista website, Facebook alone was estimated to have about 1.94 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter 2015, and many online social networks, such as Google+, Twitter, and Instagram, had several hundred million users each as of August 2015.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center, according to its July 14 online article "The Evolving Role of News on Twitter and Facebook," found that 63% of both Twitter and Facebook users get a major portion of their news from these sources.

Social Media Challenges

As these online communications environments slowly replace e-mail as the preferred electronic communications medium, they are creating a variety of digital records types--YouTube and Pinterest, for example, are specifically designed to share video and image format data--and they are storing records for information-sharing and collaborating.

The impact of this change in communications mode and information sharing architecture creates unique challenges for ensuring that personal and workplace-originated electronic records are created, stored, and retained in a responsible manner.

These challenges can be met with an effective information governance (IG) program, the enterprise-level strategic information management perspective that most thoroughly encompasses records retention guidelines, regulatory compliance mandates, information privacy concerns, intellectual property protection, and litigation document production requirements.

IG for Social Media

IG--which ARMA International defines as "A strategic framework composed of standards, processes, roles, and metrics that hold organizations and individuals accountable to create, organize, secure, maintain, use, and dispose of information in ways that align with and contribute to the organization's goals"--is rapidly developing. Its concepts are embedded into the Generally Accepted Recordkeeping Principles[R] (Principles), which are available at www.arma.org/principles.

The implementation of the Principles and IG practices depends on the state of an organization's information management policies, IT systems architecture, and business environment. This means that the best way to approach IG will vary based on the organization's recordkeeping mandates, litigation profile, risk management priorities, and social media systems architectures.

Because IG is an evolving arena, it currently has few examples of extensive enterprise-wide implementation, so there is a need for sharing new perspectives and lessons learned, especially with regard to incorporating social media records into IG plans. This article provides technical information about social media platforms and suggestions for governing their use that should be of value to organizations that are struggling to extend IG controls over their social media-based information assets.

Social Media Technologies

Social media applications like Facebook and Twitter usually reside on multiple servers hosted by third parties in the Internet "cloud." They also can be hosted and maintained internally by organizations wanting to reap the rewards of browser-based collaboration functionality while maintaining access control and security themselves. But, most organizations today want to benefit from lowering their IT systems infrastructure maintenance costs through taking advantage of cloud-based applications that intrinsically offer worldwide access, minimal IT infrastructure installation costs, and little or no internally required help desk or training challenges.

This approach to outsourcing IT support and maintenance infrastructure means that organizations do not directly control the recording and retrieval of their electronic records that are being stored on third-party systems. This means they must ensure that their end user license agreements (EULAs) and service level agreements (SLAs) are designed or modified to be in compliance with...