gershwin

Social Compliance

“You say tomato, I say tomato … Let’s call the whole thing off.”
– Ira & George Gershwin (from Shall We Dance)

I heard that song recently.  The chorus reminded me of the conversation we often hear between Compliance & e-Business regarding social media within investment management.

Compliance says, “set up process to archive, show us that it works and then begin with social media.”
e-Business says, “let’s start a little bit, dabble, and then begin a compliance process as we know more.”

Our perspective is to be compliant-at-all-costs.  In 2011, there’s little appetite for being out of compliance and the potential damage that can place on a brand.  So then what?

Well, archiving and organizing social media use is becoming easier.  We see tremendous value in an archiving pilot  that tries out both a leading providers (such as Social Ware or Actiance) and internal processes.  While each pilot at each firm will have different considerations, the pilot’s will include these steps:

  1. Identify a pilot group
  2. Provision their network accounts with access to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
  3. With Compliance, develop a prescriptive set of compliant posts
  4. Have the pilot group communicate the compliant posts
  5. Test the ability to prevent, delete, or retrieve posts

With numerous software-as-a-service solutions, perhaps this is a good place to give a little (to get a little) and begin with an archiving system pilot, before the first post on your facebook wall.