Archiving Policies for Social Media Need to be Realistic
With the increase of social media content comes the realisation that it is actually a record, which records administrators are finding difficult not only to comprehend, but also the raising of the question, where does it fit in to the e-Discovery and Freedom of Information Act policies.
The National Archive and Records Administration have been instructing federal agencies, since October last year, to archive social media records, including those from third parties. In addition, Gartner predicts that by 2013, 50% of all organisations will have to produce social media content as part of an e-Discovery request.
Jesse Wilkins, Director of Systems of Engagement at AIIM International, said, “Many of you share and understand the definition of what a record is… We have to set definitions. We have to have a baseline that says, this is what we mean by social media.”
Social media policies need to be clear, but they also need to be usable and some enterprises, when setting acceptable-use policies, find that they inadvertently lock down technology. Archiving policies may also contrast to the reason for engaging with customers via social media.
Wilkins continued, “I know a lot of organisations, especially in highly-regulated sectors that will do this. If you try to pre-publish and review tweets, it defeats the purpose of the medium.” He added that whilst oversight is necessary, companies may feel that is it worth being on social networks if they feel that they must pre-publish social media information.
Charly Barth, Director of Records at the Department of the Navy, said, “Simply taking a ‘snapshot’ after social media content goes live won’t create a sufficient archive. There’s not a lot of value there when the links don’t work and you can’t really drill down into the content. It’s just a picture of a page.”
The Federal Records Council’s social media subgroup recently submitted a White Paper including recommendations for Web 2.0 archiving policies and implementation aides. According to the report to NARA, it is recommended that agencies:
• Copy and paste social media record content into a Microsoft Word document and in a PDF format, and save it to a records management application.
• Copy and paste social media record content into a Microsoft Word document and in a PDF format, and save it to a share drive, hard drive or something other than the RMA.
• Use a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed to collect information into an RSS aggregator, such as Google Reader.
• Use an RSS feed to pull information into an email account and save the record in an RMA.
• Use one of several commercial, social media archiving tools embedded within the social media site or sold commercially.
Some social media platforms may have a social media archiving tool embedded into their platform, but many organisations are not aware that they can ask social media companies, such as Facebook or Twitter, to accommodate their records management needs rather than just going through the fine print and clicking ‘I accept’.
Written by: Allie Philpin