Lewis' Blog Tales from the trenches of information technology

More Social Networking Nonsense

Regular readers alreaady know my stance on social networking (now called simply, "social media"). I have a couple further examples to share.

I just received an email invitation from my friends at GWAVA to attend a webinar on January 29 entitled, "Top 5 Reasons to Archive Social Media." Their blurb goes on to reference those five points:

Attend this webinar to learn the Top 5 Reasons to Archive Social Media:

1. "Federal Rules of Civil Procedure" (FRCP) Duty to Preserve: Protect your personnel, contractors and your organization

2. Enterprise collaboration is using social media at an ever-increasing rate

3. Inappropriate Use of Social Media

4. Organizational Data Leakage

5. Burden of Regulatory Compliance

I know that GWAVA is in the business of message archiving and GroupWise backup (I've attended at least one of their live seminars, and found it immensely enjoyable; I highly recommend their solutions - and their seminars - to all mail admins), however, I could cite those exact five reasons for setting a company policy explicitly prohibiting participation in such outlets either from company computers, while at work, or on behalf of the company.

Further evidence of this is a strident request I received from a client a couple of days ago. It seems that at some point in time, an employee created a F-cebook account in the Company name. That employee is no longer with the organization, and of course, there is no record of which email address he used when he created (or last updated the pofile for) that account. Further, the page has apparently been defaced, and F-cebook's legal deprtment has advisedly been slow to respond to my client's pleas for assistance in taking down the page.

This client has its own website, over which the Company maintains complete control. The Company could easily implement the kind of discussion format offered by F-cebook and still be able to manage the content. Once again, not only was the lack of a solid company policy prohibiting such activity to blame, but now my client is essentially left to the mercy of a third party (F-cebook) to (hopefully) resolve the issue. F-cebook, of course, has no apparent obligation to my client and no specific motivation to be cooperative.

Last Updated on January 14th, 2014 by LewisR