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As more of us start using social media applications to communicate in both our personal and professional lives, I’m constantly wondering about the implications this has on my profession.  Are Tweets, and other types of social media postings, considered published in the same way we might think about other publications such as web content, pamphlets, articles, newspapers, and other printed materials?  And if they are considered published, is that something we need to be concerned about managing from the perspective of an information professional?  I think a lot of communication that happens on social media is considered casual, or transitory, so we often overlook the consequences of content being recorded and retained permanently by 3^rd party applications.   

When analyzing documents to determine classification and retention, I was always taught to consider most 3^rd party documents as outside the scope of the records retention policy.  In many cases, these types of documents were considered reference and would not be retained or managed.  If it were necessary to know that the 3^rd party documents had been used in some way to make or influence a decision, they would have been referenced in documents authored by the company.  Social media, however, has changed this dynamic in three fundamental ways:

1. The process through which publication happens has been altered.  The process is now less formal, instantaneous, and may or may not go through some sort of approval or editing steps prior to dissemination. 
2. Anybody who has access to a computer or mobile device and an Internet connection can create, post, and disseminate content. 
3. Most content is publicly accessible and can be found easily through searching.

What piques my interest about all of this is how many consequences arise from these types of postings and what that means from an information management perspective.  Should social media postings be considered as published “reference-type” materials or should they be considered as received communications, in which case they could be considered records?

I think this issue is especially interesting with admissions and hiring processes.  It is becoming common for universities and colleges to search applicants’ social media accounts for information on which a decision can be based.  According to an article in the New York Times, They Loved Your G.P.A. Then They Saw Your Tweets, “30 percent of the admissions officers said they had discovered information online that had negatively affected an applicant’s prospects.”  What’s interesting from an IM perspective is whether or not those admissions officers documented and/or retained the online information that impacted their decision.  If the online information was a consideration for making a business decision, whether or not to admit the applicant, then the online information really has become part of the application and should be managed as a record.  In case of any issues in the future, such as the student wanting to know why s/he wasn’t admitted, the institution should be able to validate their decision, especially since content created by applicants may not always be available through searching in the future.  Additionally, the institution may have to verify that they were looking at the actual applicant’s online information.  Lots of people have similar names, online aliases, or fake accounts so it might not be possible to ascertain if the applicant authored the content that was being reviewed by the admissions officer. 

Is this an instance where we decide as a profession this type of information gets managed as a record and not as reference materials?