Here is the latest post in our continuing series of interviews with presenters for AIIM's inaugural Social Business Conference which is being held completely online on September 8, 2011. We asked Dianne Kelley, Director, Records Management at Viacom Inc., to share some thoughts with us about her presentation.
Companies are learning that social media can promote business and provide them with new business opportunities. It is helping them reach bigger audiences in a fast economical way. Social media tools that were once used on a personal basis are now being used by businesses. But are businesses prepared to deal with the governance that is needed to meet their business requirements? Do they understand the risk? Do Legal, Records Management, and Compliance know what Marketing or individual departments are doing with respect to social media? How do we bring these two worlds together in harmony?
How did this all happen? Being connected to the world around us has never been more easy and accessible than it is today, but it didn’t start out that way. After the Internet made it possible to reach people around the globe with a merely a click of a button, social networking exploded into one of the biggest industries of our time. Can you think back? The first email was sent with two computers setting next to each other in 1971. In 1978; Bulletin Board System (BBS) exchanged data over phone lines with other users. In 1994; One of the Social Networking Sites, Geosites was founded for users to create their own websites. In 1995; TheGlobe.com gave users the freedom to personalize their online experiences by publishing their own content and interacting with other with similar interest. In 1997; AOL instant messenger was launched – popularizing instant messaging and sixdegrees.com launches allowing profile creation and listings from friends. In 2000; the .com bubble bursts sending the stock market crashing and web entrepreneurs back to the drawing board. In 2002, Friendster is launched, pioneering the online connection of real-world friends. Its user base grows to 3 million users in the first three months. In 2003; My Space is launched – first conceived as a Friendster clone. It was created by an Internet Marketing firm, the first version was developed in 10 days!! In 2004; Facebook is launched as a way of connecting college students. It was first launched at Harvard and more than half of the 19,500 students signed up within the first month. Twitter was launched in 2006, and at the close of 2010 Japan vs Denmark World Cup Soccer Game, Twitter users published 3,283 tweets per second. In 2008; Facebook overtakes MySpace as the leading social networking site.
While this was happening, were businesses thinking about how they were going to capture and retain business records that were published on social media sites? Did the legal department worry about how they were going to preserve and collect data on social media sites that were under legal hold? I venture to say probably not. Most companies are just waking up now and saying “what are we going to do or what do I have to do”. For some this is also true for email, file shares, and SharePoint sites too. It is a game of catch up and new ways of communicating are continuing to develop. The only way we can manage what we have and be prepared for the future is have the proper governance model and framework in place. We can’t manage something if we don’t know that it exists.
I hope that by the end of my session you will be enlightened to the fact that if your company isn’t already looking at a strategy and establishing governance around social media, it needs to do so quickly. I will give you examples of a framework that you can put in place to address business records and legal holds on social media sites.
Please join Dianne for her presentation and Q&A immediately following on September 8, 2011 at 12:30 pm EDT. #socialmedia #ElectronicRecordsManagement #Records-Management #SocialBusiness #ERM #governance #legalhold