Posts Tagged ‘Risk Manager’

Social Networking: Going Online Without Crossing the Line (Research Magazine Cover Story)

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

RES-March310-Cover-200pxIn the March edition of Research Magazine they take a detailed look at the challenges financial advisors face in dealing with social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. As they point out “Some have blocked access to networking websites from advisor workstations. At least one broker-dealer requires new hires to delete their LinkedIn profile as a condition of employment.”

The challenges are very real in these highly regulated environments. Kip Gregory sums it up well “Who could blame any firm operating in a regulated industry for taking a cautious approach in the face of all that? Especially in financial services, which is at its core an industry built around the management of risk. The question is: How do you, as a competitor in this business, choose to respond to a clearly shifting landscape?”

Of course the latest move by FINRA helps ease some of the concerns of these financial firms. With the release of Notice 10-06 they address some of the big questions firms are asking. In addition to this Notice you can also download the Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking Compliance. And if you are still hungry for more information be sure to check out the play-by-play summary of the February 3rd FINRA webinar on this topic.

The article then moves on to discuss the “techno-solutions” to solving the social networking compliance problem. They highlight our Risk Manager solution for it’s ability to turn on or off any part of a social network that could cause a compliance issue. In addition, there is discussion around our ability to moderate content before it hits the social sphere as well as providing full capabilities to do a post-review after the fact.

I don’t want to give the entire article away so let me just leave you with a few final thoughts:
- Social networks are here to stay and the firms that find ways of adopting them first will have a big advantage. In fact the article points out that “100 percent of the 48 firms surveyed thought social media was here to stay and 84 percent thought it would have a lasting impact on financial services.”
- You do have to create a social media policy (don’t skip this step) – here is a good place to start (first paragraph)
- Look for ways to institutionalize your policy through social networking compliance solutions.
- Plan for change – the sites change, compliance issues change and the way advisors use these tools will change.

Read the full Research Magazine article here

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Posted in Compliance, News, eDiscovery | No Comments »

New research report on the use of social at work

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

mp_logoEvery day we are flooded with statistics about social media use, companies defining policies, companies blocking access and even companies forcing employees to delete their LinkedIn account.  Well today is no different. Manpower, a world leader in the employment services, released a report that surveyed over 7,700 business in the Asia-Pacific region. Their findings are pretty interesting.

“75% of companies did not have policies for employee use of social media in place and are opting to “wait and see”.”
Come on folks it’s time to get in the game. Social media is here to stay and if you haven’t started thinking through the strategies of how it can impact your business you are going to be left behind. Earlier this week one of the world’s most successful, AND most conservative, companies sent representative to Socialware and over 50 different companies to better understand strategies around social networking and to bring back ideas to the CEO and the rest of senior management on how to adopt these tools for their company. If they can do it, you definitely can.

“19% of Asia-Pacific employers claimed social networking was a good method for promoting collaboration and communication”
Now we are talking. Collaboration and communication is just one way companies can benefit from the use of social networking sites. You could dedicate an entire blog to this topic. In fact, there are over 42 million results on Google around the topic.

“31% of Australian employers cite social networking as helpful in building their brand.”
Quick, you need to reach 400 million people, what do you do? Superbowl ad maybe? Only if you can afford those cute talking babies from E-Trade. If not you better start looking at social media. Facebook grew by 50 million users in the last 5 months to reach a grand total of 400 million. Throw in Twitter and LinkedIn and that’s another 100 million at least. The point is there is no better way to start a conversation with the people that will care about your brand than on these sites. Find the way that works for you and then go say hello.

“Do not block them. If you’re blocking them, then your younger employees, especially those of Gen Y age, are going to either disengage and fold their arms or just get out their iPhones and BlackBerries and access them on there.”
We’ve all been here before. What happens when you forbid somebody to do something? They want to do it even more. Now with that said I’m not suggesting you open the floodgates. There are very good business reasons why you might not want employees viewing Facebook videos or photos at work. All of that activity can clog the network and rob core business applications from the bandwidth they need. So here is an alternative. Define your social media policy, turn on access, lock down parts of these sites that are off limits and then explain to your employees why. Now you’ve given them access to parts of the site that are the most valuable to your business and you’re protecting the company at the same time.

“Ultimately, businesses have an opportunity to use social media in a way that helps employees feel truly connected to the business.”
This is a good way to sum it up. Social media is here to stay. It is having a measurable impact on businesses. You can manage it on your terms. And it will increase, not decrease productivity (I have a blog post coming on that topic next).

Tweet me when you get started.

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Posted in Best Practices, Marketing, News, Social Applications | 1 Comment »

Real world advice for independent advisors, an interview with Kristen Luke

Monday, February 8th, 2010

wmmlogoKristen Luke, from Wealth Management Marketing, was gracious enough to spend some time talking through her work with independent investment advisors and financial planners. We specifically discussed social networking, what’s holding her clients back and how they are dealing with SEC and FINRA compliance issues.

1. Tell me a little about your background and Wealth Management Marketing
“Prior to starting Wealth Management Marketing in October of 2008, I headed up the marketing department of a boutique wealth management firm in San Diego for 3 years.   It was a natural transition from working at my previous job to starting WMM since I performed similar tasks, but now I do it for a variety of firms instead of just one.   I have a BA in Business Economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MBA with an emphasis in Marketing from San Diego State University.  WMM develops marketing plans for independent advisors and also provides the back office support required to implement the strategies. Basically, we are an in-house marketing department outsourced.”

2. Can you profile the clients you typically work with?
“I primarily work with independent investment advisors and financial planners.  The majority of my clients are RIAs which can range from solo practitioners with $10 million in AUM to firms with 20 employees with a few hundred million in AUM.  I also work with individual advisors at larger brokerage firms who need help creating their own individual marketing plans or are looking for assistance in creating a social media marketing strategy.”

3. What are their top issues/challenges when it comes to social media marketing?
“I consistently hear the same two challenges from my clients:
- Meeting compliance requirements.  Up until recently, it was not clear what an advisor could and could not do according to FINRA.  It is still unclear about what the SEC requires.  So many advisors tell me that their compliance departments won’t allow them to participate in social media.  I’m not sure if this is going to change now that FINRA has released their guidelines.”
Quick Note: The Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking helps address these questions.
- “Finding the time to participate in social media.”

4. What percentage of your clients are engaged with social networks today?
“Almost 100% of my clients are engaged with social networks in some way.  Most of them are only involved with LinkedIn.  Closer to 50% are involved in Facebook or Twitter for business purposes.”

5. For those that are active how are they dealing with compliance issues?
“Some advisors have not been concerned about it and are doing nothing.  Others are passing everything through their compliance departments prior to posting on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  Others are using sites likes Socialware to archive their social media activity.”

6. What would recommend to your clients that are getting ready to start engaging with social networking?
“I would recommend that they first understand what they can and cannot do from a compliance standpoint.  Then I’d recommend they start playing around with the different sites to get an understanding of which ones they like.  I find that the advisors that are most successful with social media are the ones who personally enjoy interacting on the different sites.  Once an advisor has a basic understanding of social media, it’s important to create a plan of action.  This includes finding their target market and centers of influence on the different sites, determining what type of information to broadcast and how often to do so.  Social media is like any other type of marketing.  It should be planned out to increase the likelihood of success.”

It is clear from our day-to-day conversations and interviews like this that social media will continue to play a big role for independent investment advisors and financial planners. As Kristen points out it is critical to understand the compliance issues before jumping into this new channel of communication. I’ve already mentioned the Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking and in addition you should look at the summary of the recent FINRA webinar explaining Notice 10-06 on Social Networking Compliance.

For more information from Kristen you can follow her on Twitter or at her blog.

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Posted in Compliance, Marketing, eDiscovery | No Comments »

FINRA Webinar: Compliance Considerations for Social Networking Sites

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

FINRA_logo

If you happened to miss it, FINRA hosted the Social Networking Compliance webinar this afternoon.  Here is a summary from their site on what was scheduled to be discussed:

“This webinar covers compliance and regulatory considerations when using social networking sites to communicate firm business. With the advent of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, business use of social networking sites has become popular and can present supervision challenges for firms. Panelists from FINRA discuss the guidance that was recently issued in Regulatory Notice 10-06.”

If you already read Regulatory Notice 10-06 you didn’t miss too much. I will say the most valuable part was the Q&A from the audience and FINRA staff. As you might expect the FINRA team focused on the overarching guidelines but didn’t spend too much time interpreting specific situations. They made it very clear that this is the responsibility of the firm to evaluate a sites capabilities and determine what the firm’s policy will be on usage, supervision, record keeping, etc.

If you are looking for more details on how these guidelines get interpreted for use on social networks you should download the Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking Compliance.

And if you are interested in a summary of the webinar here are all of my live tweets that I posted during the session. Feel free to follow me on Twitter and send me any questions you have.

  • Joe Price talking about FINRA task force on social networking, 14 industry participants, came out with Notice 10-06
  • 5 key points, record keeping, suitability, types of content, supervision & 3rd party posts
  • Record Keeping: rules flow from SEC standards, no way to change this. Must retain, archive and retrieve to be compliant
  • Record Keeping: technology is going to be the issue, FINRA spoke to firms (including Socialware – we solve this today with Risk Manager)
  • Record Keeping: discussing integration to enterprise archives, lot of interest in area, each firm needs to assess each solution
  • FINRA will not endorse any technology provider, firms need to assess the fit, determine if it delivers on compliance needs
  • interested in position on acceptable formats of social media messaging for FINRA filing and internal record keeping
  • Question: how do you file a tweet? Acceptable filing format is PDF for FINRA but not for retention (discovery issues, etc)
  • Suitability: 01-23 applies to social media directly, applies around recommendations, “call to action” or “suggestion”
  • Suitability: more specific to individual more likely it will be a recommendation, general news not a rec.
  • Suitability: call to action is key, not going to have prior approval requirement so be careful of what you post
  • Possible use of templates? Firms have libraries, drop a recommendation of an approved template, be careful of specific products
  • Question: “Business as such?” SEC term, not addressing it in Notice 10-06, books and records rule apply in this situation
  • Question: “if we decide to utilize social media we must have technology to track information” there are low tech options…
  • …technology is going to be key to make this scale
  • Question: “if a rep indicates where they work is that an advertisement?” ex: business card info on LinkedIn, likely already approved
  • Question: “business related inquiry on social media site?” addressing later, need to have procedures for reps to follow
  • Content Types: “interactive electronic forum” have def. of public appearance (i.e., chat rooms), must all be supervised
  • Content Types: public appearances do not need to be pre-approved
  • Content Types: blogs? static communication = advertisement = prior approval. However some allow for interaction
  • Content Type: These interactive blogs would be considered a public appearance (i.e., allowing comments)
  • Question: “What if firm hosts a blog and allows for 3rd party comments? What if it is a marketing brochure blog?” This is static
  • Content Types: key ideas, employees should have site use approved for use of logos, content, etc (the static elements)
  • Content Types: engaging on the sites can then be supervised post-use, these are the interactive pieces
  • Content Type: firms should decide on their own policies as part of this.
  • Content Types: key is whether or not a dialogue is supported or intended on these portions of social sites
  • Technology to capture content is still evolving, will there be compliance grace period? FINRA answer “No”
  • Firms must make the call if a vendor can meet the FINRA requirements (check out companion guide http://bit.ly/72HiGj)
  • Recently looking at a blog that wasn’t interactive, send email back and comment *not real-time interactive communication*
  • Question: “On Twitter, is initial posting interactive or static?” background content is static part, tweets are interactive
  • Question: “what if social site doesn’t allow for archiving?” answer don’t use it or use a 3rd party solution (i.e., Socialware)
  • Question: “what about broker-to-broker communication?” defined as institutional sales material (2211), already defined
  • Question: “How will FINRA test compliance?” FINRA provides policy guidelines, new process, examiners take steps to analyze steps  …
  • Question: …will look for supervisory steps, will look for policies, will look for other steps that compliance is being addressed with
  • Supervision: interactive communications can be supervised, implement risk based principles to review communications
  • Question: “Use of sites for recruiting?” Yes – they are subject to FINRA advertising rules, static vs. interactive
  • Question: Recruiting issue – expectation of earnings. Be careful here, this is most frequent issue
  • Question: “can registered reps conduct pre-approved, scripted, filed FINRA presentations via a webex type of application, w/instant messaging” …
  • …”assuming IM’s are being supervised by a reg. principle?” webinar=static, questions=interactive (can be supervised)
  • Supervision: can choose to pre-approve or not, can choose to sample pre or post, lot of flexibility, you decide
  • Supervision: communication between research and investment bank always need review, as well as incoming complaints
  • Question: “do personal social sites of RR need to be monitored to ensure not being used for professional use?” …
  • Question: … firms need to establish procedures/policies on this, once used for business firms are responsible,
  • Question: “don’t want reps using Facebook, agree not to, is firm responsible to still track?” I don’t know, maybe based on person
  • Question: “are firms accountable for how RR identifies themselves on personal SN site” firms need to adopt clear policies on this
  • Question: “does review of interactive communication have to be conducted by a registered principal” can be some delegation
  • Should not allow RR to use social media sites if you cannot supervise it (for business purposes)
  • Ensure you train those that are granted access, enforce your procedures, have consequences for violations
  • Question: “prohibit from using certain social site features, are firms accountable if RR use them if “prohibited”?” …
  • Question: Answer is same. They are responsible. (Socialware can disable these features completely to protect the firm – look at Feature Level Access Control of Risk Manager)
  • Question: “how do you supervise an anonymous complaint?” guidance already provided, must be able to identify person & issue
  • 3rd Party Posts: not subject to advertising rule (great clarity), situations where you can be held accountable
  • 3rd Party Posts: adoption & entanglement, you republish or direct people to content, you just adopted it and endorsed it
  • 3rd Party Posts: influenced posts, can you please post a testimonial to my Facebook page = entanglement
  • Question: “implicit endorsement of posts, rep didn’t remove a comment?” does not create an endorsement situation
  • Question: “RR retweets a post, is this an endorsement/entanglement” absolutely endorsement or adoption
  • Question: “What if you “like” a comment on Facebook” Yes absolutely that is an endorsement (FYI – Socialware can block this)
  • Question: “what if statement is just wrong, what should firm do?” adopt policy to enable quick action, still needs to be supervised
  • Adoption & entanglement is SEC concept, one-off answers not the way to go, each firm should develop a complete policy
  • Firms are doing a lot of different things to monitor 3rd party posts, complaints, publishing guidance
  • Great FINRA webinar, hope you enjoyed the live tweets, be sure to grab the Companion Guide for SN Compliance http://bit.ly/72HiGj

Look for much more from Socialware on this topic. And if you haven’t registered for a Risk Manager invitation please do so here (it is free). Of course, if you want to get started right away you can sign up for the premium version here.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Just released: Companion Guide to FINRA Social Networking Compliance

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

FINRABlogPostYesterday FINRA surprised everyone by releasing Regulatory Notice 10-06, titled “Social Media Web Sites – Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites.” Since September of 2009, FINRA created and has been working with a Social Networking Task Force to discuss “how firms and registered representatives could use social sites for legitimate business purposes in a manner that ensures investor protection.” One of the key goals of this task force, and this new notice, is to interpret the FINRA rules with the knowledge of the changing landscape of social media to allow firms to communicate in this channel while still protecting investors.

For the most part there is nothing new in the Notice. FINRA reinforces their position on long standing electronic communication guidelines reiterating that those rules apply exactly as stated for social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  For example:

  • Recordkeeping – firms ARE required to retain social media records that a related to a broker-dealer’s business.
  • Supervision – firms MUST monitor the extent to which employees are complying with policies.
  • Pre-approval – firms MUST define their policy for pre or post approval depending on their risk profile.

While reinforcing some of the core guidelines there were a few key clarifications that make adopting social networks a little bit easier in the financial services arena.  For example:

  • Static vs. Dynamic content – a registered principle is still required to pre-approve any static content such as a profile or Twitter background details. Dynamic content such as wall posts constitute an interactive electronic forum and therefore firms do not have to have a registered principal approve these communications prior to use.
  • Third-party posts – FINRA clarified that posts by customers or other third parties are not governed by rule 2210. However, if a firm endorses one of these posts they may become attributable to the firm.

While this update is a very positive step for firms there is still the open question of how to address the compliance requirements in an automated fashion.  Additionally, FINRA does not address every fine grain issue you will run into on social networks that could trigger a compliance violation. For example, does Favoriting a tweet trigger rule 2210 because of an endorsement? And more importantly how will protect your firm from these possible violations?

To help firms accelerate their adoption of social networking tools Socialware has released the Companion Guide to FINRA/SEC Social Networking Compliance. This guide provides a detailed analysis of social networks and how their capabilities can trigger regulatory rules. Furthermore, it provides a clear checklist of requirements to evaluate social networking compliance solutions.

For more details you can read the press release and download the guide now.

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Posted in Best Practices, Compliance, News, Social Middleware, eDiscovery | 5 Comments »

Government, Social Networks and Freedom of Information

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

governmentI came across an article yesterday, titled Twitter and Government Transparency. In it Andy Opsahl outlines the potential challenges social networks are creating for government entities.  The question being raised is whether or not activity on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn need to be archived and available for records requests.

As Melinda Catapano points out in the article “if this is connected to official agency work, you better be able to produce that record.” But aren’t these consumer sites, just used for personal use? The answer is it depends. While the lines are blurring between personal and professional use on these sites one thing is clear. If you are using them to communicate agency work you can be assured that it is going to be governed by the same set of principles that govern other communications

In fact, Wisconsin Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen recently issued an opinion in which he states that electronic communications made by elected officials are public records, even when they are posted on social networking sites. Van Hollen states that the Wisconsin Public Records laws applies whenever the content is connected to the official’s purpose or function.

One option many agencies have employed is to simply block access to these sites. That course of action flies in the face of The President’s Open Government Directive.  These sites are the perfect platform to create transparency, participation and collaboration. The Bright Side of Government recently did a blog post that discusses this exact topic. Of course with increased levels of participation comes the need to comply with the federal guidelines such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Public Information Act.

Catapano admits that “she, like numerous other CIOs, didn’t have a clue as to how to archive external social networking posts”. She goes further by saying “it would probably be a good master’s thesis because everybody needs those answers and everybody seems to be avoiding the problem.”

Well there is good news Melinda. One you are not alone in that other industries are struggling with this same challenge. Here is a quick snapshot of the issues that financial services organizations face around embracing social networks.  Second, there actually is an automated solution to archiving social network activity and content. Socialware’s Risk Manager solution was built from the ground up to solve this problem and many others that can arise from business related usage of social networks.

Today we are currently working with a number of government agencies and look forward to sharing their success stories over the coming weeks and months. In the mean time if you are interested in signing up you can request a free invitation here.

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Posted in Compliance, News, Social Middleware | No Comments »

When is a social media policy not enough?

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

policyAs more and more companies race to adopt social technologies they inevitably ask the question, “what should our policy be?” Depending on the industry and the company you will find a wide range of policies. Some are a few paragraphs and some are literally pages long. If you are looking for some examples here is a great list of policies across a number of industries.  Additionally, here is a more specific list of government related social media policies.

I will be the first to say that policies are important when it comes to opening up the social web to your employees. But a word of caution, don’t stop after pressing the save button.  In a recent report from Deloitte they posed the question to employees “what is your company’s policy when it comes to use of social networking channels”? Here were the responses:

  • 26% – There are specific guidelines as to what you can and cannot say online in relations to the company and/or client matter
  • 7% – The policy is to use your discretion when it comes to posting comments and opinions on the world wide web and social networking sites
  • 11% – There is a policy, but I don’t know what it is
  • 23% – There is no policy
  • 24% – Don’t know if there is a policy

Note that 58% either don’t have a policy or don’t know what it is. This should be concerning. After all if your company believes it’s important enough to create a policy isn’t it just as critical to ensure the policy is followed? On that topic how will you monitor it to ensure compliance? In regulated industries like financial services and government this is even more critical as regulators require that certain activity be captured and archived.

The Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America (IIABA) recently published a great resource titled “Creating a Social Web Policy for Your Independent Agency”.  The report offers some very good recommendations and detailed steps on how to go about creating a social media policy. However, there are two recommendations that I would like to expand on.

The first is related to “compliance with federal and state discovery, document retention and other laws and agency procedures.” In the guide they state “employees should copy and paste any client specific social media communication into the agency management system and record an activity in the same manner they would in using other media.”  While that is one way to capture and retain the data it is enormously unproductive and it also raises questions around completeness of the archive.

What happens if someone forgets to take these steps or decides they simply don’t want to? A better approach would be to leverage automated solutions, like our Risk Manager product as an example, that sits between the end user and the social networks to automatically capture and retain the content. Not only will this eliminate the manual work around data capture and retention but it also guarantees completeness.

The second is around advertising statutes and regulations. They correctly state that “social media posts are communications subject to various federal and state laws/regulations, including characterization as advertising under some state laws, so employees should make sure they are complying with all such laws in using social media.” This is correct. The detail that is missing though is how you will comply in this new environment. Again I’ll go back to our Risk Manager product as a mechanism to help ensure compliance on this point and many others.

I encourage you to download the IIABA report if you have not created your social media policy. If you are looking for more information on how the FINRA/SEC rules impact social network use you should take a look at this summary as well. Last be sure you have the tools in place to make it as easy as possible for your employees to meet the policy and compliance guidelines as they start to use these powerful sites.

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Posted in Compliance, News, Social Middleware, eDiscovery | No Comments »

New Cisco Report: Need for Social Middleware

Friday, January 15th, 2010

SocialNetsEnterpriseCisco recently commissioned and published a report to study how organizations use consumer social networking tools.  The results were both promising and shocking. The report reveals the both the value of adopting these tools in the enterprise and also the risks that need to be addressed through stronger governance and IT involvement.

Here are a few of the study highlights.

The first set of findings point to the increased use and integration of consumer-based social networking tools in the enterprise.

“75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.”

This part is old news. Organizations are racing to adopt social networking and microblogging tools to help drive the business and it seems there is a new article about it every day.

“Social networking tools are spreading into core areas of the value chain, including the marketing and communications, human relations, and customer service departments.”

Organizations are now moving beyond social networking silos. They’ve already proven there is value in tapping these tools as stand alone solutions and now they are looking for ways to integrate social into their enterprise processes and systems.  This is the next big wave.

While usage and integration is skyrocketing, companies have been lax in regards to governance and involving IT in their decisions.  Ultimately, this creates a great deal of risk and exposure.

“Only 1 in 7 companies noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes, indicating that the potential risks associated with these tools in the enterprise are either overlooked or not well understood.”

This is likely a result of the unbridled growth of these tools and all the buzz associated with them.  But like any good business decision, companies need to step back, understand what they are trying to achieve, evaluate the risks and put the tools in place to manage the program. I will say that the companies we’ve been working with in regulated industries are taking a very programmatic approach to adopting social.  While other industries may not face the same challenges they can learn a lot from these institutions.

“Only 1 in 5 participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking technologies in the enterprise.”

This point has come up before.  If you fall in this camp be sure to check out this list of sample social media policies.  As of today there are over 115 examples.  In addition, here is a great list of government related social media policies.

Be careful in thinking that a policy alone is all you need.  Deloitte found in an Ethics & Workplace Survey that 49% of employees say a company policy won’t change how they behave online. As a result you should evaluate tools to help you monitor activity to protect your employees and your brand.

“Due to the unstructured nature of social networking, companies continue to struggle with policy creation and adoption, as copying an established governance process from other, more structured areas (for example, information technology) often doesn’t work for social networking.”

Until recently companies have had two choices when it comes to social networking sites. Open the floodgates or completely block access. Since these are consumers sites there are no built in management controls for the enterprise. This is one reason why social middleware has become such a hot topic.  With it companies can apply structure, define policies, control access and protect their brand on these open, consumer sites.

“Businesses also find difficulty in striking the right balance between the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some degree of corporate oversight.”

We hear this a lot from our clients as well.  On Twitter users can easily create multiple personas.  However, on Facebook and LinkedIn you are only allowed a single account under their terms of use.  As a result there is no way to separate your personal activity from the professional on these sites.

Again the need for social middleware becomes clear.  Adopting this middle layer creates the ability for employees to choose whether or not content is personal vs. professional.  As a result companies can implement policies that give employees the ability to choose what category the content falls under and as a result how that content will be monitored, retained and managed by the enterprise.

“Only 1 in 10 respondents noted direct IT involvement in externally facing social networking initiatives. Although the IT department is typically not involved as a primary decision maker, respondents did recognize the need for these tools to scale and properly integrate with existing business processes to reap maximum benefits.”

There are two items of note here. First for companies to realize the full benefits of these tools they will need direct integration to their people, processes and systems. Building loose connections in a one-off manner to each of these sites it not the answer.  IT will want a single point of integration to marry enterprise processes with the top sites of today and those that will be the next Facebook tomorrow.

The second reason it is critical to involve IT is that these sites have a very real impact on the infrastructure of the enterprise. A report from Blue Coat noted “a company based in the US was having problems connecting with its South Africa office” due to the fact that “the bandwidth on its WAN link was completely consumed and it found that 75% of that traffic was Facebook.”

Of course blocking access is not the answer. In that same report they highlighted a customer that “blocked Facebook and within 48 hours they had to unblock it.  Marketing and HR had complained that it was critical to them getting the job done.”

There has to be a happy medium.  Companies will be forced to open up access to these tools but at the same time they need to manage that access.  One solution to the bandwidth problem is to govern access to those parts of the site that consume the most, like videos and photos.  This way you meet the needs of the business by giving access while not crippling the rest of the network.

In addition to the analysis in the report there are some great perspectives by industry leaders on why adopting these social tools will ultimately be a driver of success and competitive advantage.

“Companies who will succeed in embracing the tremendous power of social networking will be those who design a collaborative IT architecture capable of supporting the use of these technologies and mitigating the risks they pose.”
Nick Earle, senior vice president, Cisco Services

“Businesses need to embrace social media not only to remain competitive, but also to continue to attract top talent. The next generation of leaders will be exceptionally savvy with these tools, so 3M is using social media externally to help us with recruiting. Several of the graduates we hired this year specifically told us that they hadn’t considered 3M before they saw our employer profile on social media.”
Hugh Murphy, e-Channels, 3M U.K. and Ireland

Thanks Cisco for a great report on a hot topic. I’m looking forward to part 2.

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Posted in Best Practices, Compliance, Consumerization of IT, Marketing, News, Social Applications, Social Middleware | No Comments »

Bringing financial advisors into the modern world

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

investment-news-logoInvestmentNews, a publication specializing in delivering news and analysis essential to the business of financial advisers, posted an in depth look at Socialware and our solutions this past Friday.

Most of us take for granted the use of social networks at work.  However, for registered investment advisors or broker-dealers, they must juggle using these tools to grow their business while ensuring compliance with federal and state law.  For example, look at the laundry list of rules around advertisements and the type of communications that must comply with regulatory rules:

- Banner advertisements, blogs, and bulletin boards are advertisements
- An email or instant message sent to more than 25 prospective retail customers is considered sales literature
- A registered representative’s email sent from home or a firm office falls under FINRA jurisdiction
- Chat room discussions are considered public appearances
- Password protected websites are considered sales literature

Then of course, rules 17a3 and 17a4 of the Securities Exchange Act require broker-dealers to preserve certain electronic records. And in many cases prior approval and supervision is generally required before being published.

Naturally this raises a lot of questions around the use of social networks.  Is participation in Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter considered an advertisement? Does it need to gain prior approval before publishing? Does this information need to be archived by the same standards?  On this point Richard Ketchum, the CEO of FINRA, came out on national TV calling for a complete audit trail of this data.

So while the picture isn’t entirely clear one thing is for sure. These sites offer real business value for the financial advisor community today.  Individuals or firms that are engaging on the social networks are doing their best to stay compliant even if it requires a lot of manual work.

Just look at some stats captured during a recent RidgeWorth Investments’ Webinar
- 60% of financial advisors who participated believe that social networking will grow in importance over the next year or two.
- 1 out of 5 said it already plays or will play a significant role in their 2010 marketing efforts

And let’s face it, social networks are all about connections, friends and acquaintances.  And in the offline world those three things all translate to gold for financial advisors…referrals.  The problem is the old way is inefficient and outdated. Advisors and firms need to get in the game so to speak, and soon.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. First FINRA is holding a live webinar titled Compliance Considerations for Social Networking Sites on March 17, 2010 at 1:30 p.m. EST.   Here is the webinar summary in their words:

“This webinar covers compliance and regulatory considerations when using social networking sites to communicate firm business. With the advent of Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, business use of social networking sites has become popular and can present supervision challenges for firms. Panelists from FINRA discuss applicable FINRA rules for communications with the public and offer practical guidance on how to monitor and supervise social networking sites.”

The other piece of good news is that there are finally tools available to help both individual advisors and larger firms be compliant while using these tools (even if the final FINRA guidance hasn’t been delivered).  This is covered in detail in the InvestmentNews article.

The article covers how Socialware’s technology helps advisors and firms get compliant by enabling complete social media archiving, real-time content moderation and discovery of every piece of captured content.  But what’s more, they also discuss how our Social Middleware solutions can help take social networking investments to the next level by aggregating professional posts, from all three social networks, into a single search engine optimized feed that will help drive additional free traffic to your site, improve your market awareness and ultimately help drive sales.

I hope you enjoy the article – if you do please pass it along using one of the sites below.  And as always we would love to hear your comments.

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Posted in Best Practices, Compliance, Marketing, News, Social Applications, Social Middleware, Social Networking News, eDiscovery | No Comments »

Announcing two special arrivals

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

TitterStorkI am happy to announce the arrival of my new son, Cooper.  He was born early Monday morning and everything went as planned.  As you might expect, both Twitter and Facebook were updated immediately and of course tons of pictures got posted for friends and family to see that day -  technology is great.

There is one other special arrival I want to announce. Today we officially launched Socialware.com (my other “baby”).  Here are a few of the key stats.  The site is 29 pages long and weighs in at 4.9MB.  We’d like to thank the team at Clutch Creative, they did a great job on delivering the site.   Please don’t send any gifts to the Socialware family – just pass along the great news.

Before you head over to check out the new site I wanted to share some highlights:

- You will notice right away that you can get started with Socialware for FREE.  This includes both our Risk Manager and Social Marketer products.  Don’t wait, sign up today! While you are checking out Social Marketer be sure to look at our Social Stream – this is an example of how you can take advantage of the enterprise version by embedding it directly on our site.

- If you are looking for more information on how to get started with social just download our whitepaper “Guide to Embracing Social Technologies in Regulated Industries”.

- Need more proof of the value of engaging with social?  Go grab our free Social ROI Framework.  This will help you make the case to management that now is the time to start tapping the power of these tools.

- In addition to the calculator, share some of the stats from our industry stats page.  There is a wealth of great information here that provides even more reason to start engaging with social technologies.

- And last but not least, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, friend us on Facebook, track us on YouTube and subscribe to this blog for the latest news and information.

We hope you enjoy the site.  After you take a look please let us know what you think by writing a comment below, sending a tweet or posting to Facebook.

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Posted in News, Social Applications, Social Middleware | 1 Comment »