Blogs

No, social media governance is not an oxymoron. But governance for social is different in some ways from how we've approached it with other types of information. It's difficult to put a Facebook Like into a repository, index it, declare it as a record, and disposition it at the end of the lifecycle. It can be challenging to determine when something like a wiki article or blog post with comments is "done enough" to manage it according to existing governance processes. 

And yet it still has to be done - if you have any doubts that your or your organization's social media is discoverable or falls under existing regulatory requirements let me put that to rest. And in fact Gartner has recently published research indicating that by 2013 - assuming the world doesn't end - fully half of organizations will have had to produce social content for discovery. 

So how do you do it? How do organizations apply existing governance processes to social - and where they don't fit, how do organizations extrapolate to something that does? 

This is the first post in a series that will explore some of these issues and how to address them. In some instances we'll look at specific tools; in others they will be more broadly applicable across a variety of tools - for example, the challenges associated with producing content almost certainly stored outside your data center and on Facebook's. We'll look at the impact of social on highly regulated sectors, and public records, and how to produce social content in response to regulatory or legal requests. And we'll take a look at all the elements of the governance framework: roles and responsibilities, processes, and technologies and how to apply them in the age of social media. 

I hope you'll find this information of value - as always don't hesitate to post a comment or drop me a note at jwilkins@aiim.org or on Twitter at @jessewilkins.