One of the issues I spend some time worrying about is how to balance my enthusiasm for social technologies with the very real concerns that exist as organizations consider the control and compliance realities.
We've done a bit of research on the question of whether there are any solutions to help with the following specific use case:
I want my people out promoting our company/organization on external sites (like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter), but I also want a want a way to archive and retain what they are saying. And I don't want to do anything clunky like: 1) doing individual screen scrapes and somehow archiving them; 2) copying/pasting content from public sites to my internal RM systems; or 3) pre-screening activities BEFORE they do it and push that into some sort of retention system.
Here are some solutions that I have found with the assistance of my colleague Jesse Wilkins. If I've left any companies out, let me know via a comment and I'll add it to the post.
Note: All information below comes straight from COMPANY WEBSITES. I have not at this point attempted to validate the claims made, I am just trying to get the companies all in one place. Perhaps those experienced with a particular solution might post a comment (no fair competitors slamming others; I'll delete you). I have also not yet noted in the post which ones are AIIM members and which ones are not, which may be an issue for users to consider in the context of industry commitment.
Some of the companies that follow are great big enterprise solutions, and some are more modest.
In alphabetical order...
1. Actiance
http://actiance.com/default.aspx
Socialite Enable provides granular control of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, controlling access to more than 200 features and content areas Socialite Enable also provides pre approval, post review management and archiving of traffic routed through the solution. Socialite Enable includes a number of key features for securely enabling the use of social networks, including:
- Identity Management - the ability to establish a single corporate identity and track users across multiple social media platforms (e.g., @JohnJones on Twitter is the same as JohnHJones on LinkedIn).
- Data leak prevention - preventing sensitive data from leaving the company, either maliciously or inadvertently
- Granular application control - enabling the access to Facebook, but not access to chat or downloading and installing any of the applications in the gaming category.
- Pre-approval or Moderator control - for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, where content is required to be pre-approved by a Corporate Communications Officer or other third party.
- Activity control - the ability to manage access to features, such as who can read, like, comment upon, or access nearly a hundred features.
- Log conversation and content - capture all posts, messages and commentary made to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in context, including exporting to an archive of choice for eDiscovery.
2. Aleph Archives
The two main obstacles one encounters when keeping a digital document are that of the fragility of storage medium and that of technical obsolescence. Websites archiving, moreover, raises the problem of selecting and gathering data from complex websites (national libraries for example). As digital documents, websites are particularly complex elements. They are made of several types of media : text, images, sounds, animations and streams. There are two ways to consider how to archive a website :
- Manual or semi-automatic archiving, which aims at collecting sites according to a determined selection.
- Automatic archiving with the help of indexation robots. These robots visit websites on a regular basis and capture them either partially or totally (as snapshots).
- CAMA® robots collect contents regardless of internal website architectures and publishing platforms.
- As opposed to other tools which can change your way to view a Web archive, accessing an archive in CAMA® is natural, smooth (click-and-run model) and completely logical (no URL rewriting, no Javascript injection, etc.)
- Your stored data’s authenticity is guaranteed by CAMA® as unaltered by human hands.
- CAMA® gives you the choice to use your archives with other analysis tools (such as linguistic software) as it is based on a open and normalized WARC storage format (ISO 28500:2009).
- CAMA® offers a friendly and natural access to your archives. Access servers are available within your infrastructure or on-line as PaaS (Platforms as a Service)
3. ArchiveSocial
ArchiveSocial is a social media archiving solution for business compliance and legal protection. ArchiveSocial automates record keeping from networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It is designed to address record keeping challenges for businesses in industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare, government, and education. Key benefits:
- Designed for social media: ArchiveSocial interfaces directly with each service to archive records regardless of device or network used to post content. Unlike solutions built on email and web archiving technology, ArchiveSocial preserves social media records in their native format. This enables far superior search, export, and records management capabilities.
- Built for compliance and legal protection: ArchiveSocial satisfies strict industry regulations including those such as SEC 17a-4 and FINRA 10-06 in financial services. Records are digitally timestamped to prove authenticity and can be utilized as legal evidence. Data is stored safely and securely in a SAS 70 Type II-compliant data center.
- Accessible to business of all sizes: As a pure cloud based solution, ArchiveSocial enables any organization to sign up online and start archiving in a matter of minutes. We offer subscription plans suitable for any business ranging from individual business owners to enterprises. There is no software to install and no long term contract required.
4. Arkovi
Originally built by financial services professionals for financial services professionals, Arkovi today also serves the social media archiving needs of companies and entities in the pharmaceutical, government and education fields. As you archive your material, you can monitor it to learn more about your customer base. Analyzing stored content can help you develop fresh insights that can be applied to new initiatives.
Key benefits:
- Archive Rather than “archive and forget” (until there is a problem), users can tap into the hidden power of their social media and web site activity in real time
- Access “Always on” archiving provides instant access to users for all stored content 24/7
- Analyze Use “lessons learned” in real time to apply to your next communications effort
- Monitor Checking social media conversations keeps marketers informed of new possibilities – and problems to avoid
- Convert When you tap into the energy in your archive, you open the door to converting prospects into new clients
- Engage Multiple users can set rules and coordinate all activities through customized analytics and content dashboards
5. Backupify
Simple, automated backups of your personal, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and other social media & web apps accounts. Perfect for personal users, small businesses and social media professionals.
6. Next Point (CloudPreservation)
http://www.cloudpreservation.com/
The Cloud Preservation service automatically crawls your web properties at chosen intervals, building an archive of html source code and resources, high quality snapshots, and a robust full-text search index. It's your secure, forensically sound answer to regulatory obligations and e-discovery readiness.
The service makes it a breeze to go back in time with all of your Web sites, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to search content, preview records, and produce or export your data.
7. Hanzo Archives
Hanzo provides comprehensive and dynamic website archiving products and services, which enable you to collect, archive, preserve and produce your social media interactions and conversations. Our social media archiving is based on the same proven technologies and methodologies we use for website archiving, used by our clients in many regulated industries and sectors, as well as in e-discovery.
Being native format web-based technology, we’re capable of collecting any web content, including publicly accessible websites, blogs, forums, Video, Flash, and wikis. This native format approach to archiving social media enables us to offer the broadest support for many social networks, and indeed enables us to expand on the usual definition of social media, beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to include your blogs, blog commentary, question and answer services, customer forums, YouTube, wikis, etc.
As with our website archiving services, our social media archiving services are backed up by our technology leadership, SAS-70 certified data centre, FINRA and SEC 17a-4 compliance, and more.
Our website and social media archives can be integrated with other enterprise archives using our Web Archive Connector, including the market leading enterprise archive platform from Symantec, with Web Archive Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault.
8. Iterasi
Archive social media content from accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Authenticating and connecting through these network's API's allows us to capture both publicly available data and data stored behind password protection (e.g. Direct Messages on Twitter and Messages on Facebook).
Capture many types of social media data—status updates, group discussions, photos, videos, private messages, friend lists, events, profiles, pages and more.
Our capabilities grow every day. If you need to archive data from other social networks we can capture content through RSS feeds, page capture and other methods.
9. LiveOffice (Symantec)
Many organizations are looking for the safest way to integrate social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, into their regular business communications. However, the attractive qualities of social media, such as its immediacy and broad reach, also make it a potentially risky business tool that must remain discoverable in the event of a lawsuit.
As a result of social media's rising popularity in the corporate world, many organizations are searching for ways to properly capture and supervise this content type. The good news is that some archiving solutions now offer built-in functionality that can help organizations meet their e-discovery and compliance requirements surrounding social media communications.
Below are questions to ask archiving vendors about their social media capabilities:
- Can the solution capture all messages from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in a centralized repository?
- Are all messages/posts searchable in the event of an e-discovery request or compliance audit?
- Does the solution allow administrators to define specific usage privileges?
- Does the solution allow designated personnel to review, approve or reject messages before they are posted?
- Does the solution automatically enforce pre-determined policies?
- Does the solution meet FINRA guidance for social media capture? (Applies only to registered securities firms.)
10. Page Freezer
PageFreezer uses crawling technology, similar to that of Google, to take snapshots of your website. Archiving is an automated process, saving you time. Only new webpages and changes to webpages are archived, saving storage space. PageFreezer offers the unique feature to browse through a website exactly as it appeared live online on a specified date.
PageFreezer places a digital signature and a digital timestamp on each archived page. The Digital Timestamp is evidence of the time the page was archived and the Digital Signature provides evidence that the page was not changed since it was archived. These features can be used in court to demonstrate that the archived page is the page as it existed on your web site at that time.
Archives are securely stored in a SAS-70 compliant data center with excellent firewall protection. For added protection against disaster, a copy of your website archives is stored in a second location thousands of miles away. When requiring a local copy for any reason, you simply request a data export in XML format of all media, including HTML, PDF, TXT, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, XML, CSS or even Flash.
11. Smarsh
End-to-end social media compliance solutions from Smarsh give organizations of all sizes the preservation, supervision and policy controls to embrace the emerging regulatory requirements to review and archive content from social networking sites Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter.
Firms can automate policy company-wide, define which social networking features employees have access to, and review, approve, or reject messages before they are posted. Compliance officers and inside legal counsel will be able to monitor both static and interactive corporate communication with ease and intelligent functionality. All messages are captured, preserved in their native form and indexed in the secure Smarsh archive. Postings will be indexed and searchable via message criteria, including date and content keywords.
Selected postings can then be produced on-demand, assigned to multiple reviewers, or marked or tagged as "complaint" or "advertising" for compliance and supervisory review. All administrator activity is logged and quantifiable, illustrating policy enforcement and evidence of review for social media compliance. An audit trail captures data on every visual inspection of each posting in the social media archive and compliance officers can quantify social media data with comprehensive reporting functionality. Customizable organizational usage reports and evidence of supervision/policy enforcement can be created for review as evidence of a reasonably designed policy
12. Socialware
Reduce time and effort developing your company’s social media compliance policy. Start with best-in-class templates we have created from our work with more than 125 financial services firms. Then, use our industry-leading compliance software to exercise feature-level accesss control. Manage an unlimited number of group policies so that thousands of employees can seamlessly and directly access Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Compliance teams easily scale social media coverage across thousands of financial professionals using Socialware workflows and automated processes. Users create profiles and submit them for approval in an intuitive manner. Compliance officers are notified automatically about profile changes. This lowers the burden and barriers for compliant user access and also social media supervision for your compliance team.
Social media compliance requires firms to capture, record, and archive 100% of social conversations. Compliance officers know that, using Socialware, all data is retained correctly regardless of device. We provide native integration with email archiving systems to conform to your existing processes. Because context is vital for compliance, our software also records complete conversation threads.
13. Sonian
Sonian Social Media & Instant Message Archiving for Businesses. Sonian IM Archive™ is powering the next generation of message data management solutions. Designed for the broadest range of supported communication formats, low cost of provision, and seamless integration with existing systems, Sonian IM Archive is the ideal fit for today’s IT challenges and completes any message product offering.
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instant Message are Becoming the Preferred Form of Business Communication. Critical and casual business communication is taking place every day via Instant Messaging (IM), Text Message (SMS), and Social Media. Addressing these mediums are a necessary part of achieving better business practices. Sonian IM Archive™ integrates IM, SMS, and Social Media data with present future messaging solutions, helping to achieve compliance and reduce the cost of eDiscovery research and regulatory oversight.
Deploy your Instant Message or Social Media Archive Quickly with Zero Maintenance. Sonian IM Archive™ is easy to deploy, requires zero maintenance, and automatically adapts to the evolving IM, SMS, and Social Media technology landscape.
Your Social Media, IM, & SMS Communications Should be Compliant. It is important to know that IM, SMS, and Social Media are subject to the same industry and governmental regulations as email. Sonian works with you to bring compliance obligations within your reach.
14. ZL Technologies
Through its suite of social media archiving solutions, ZL Unified Archive® enables businesses to capture, index, search, review, preserve and produce chats and messages from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and RSS Feeds in order to meet legal and regulatory demands.
System administrators can monitor social media communications and promptly report on irresponsible corporate use. With extensive auditing capabilities, ZL is able to capture all user or administrator actions, changes, and configuration modes. Administrators can quickly quantify data by creating customized reports detailing audited activity.
ZL UA uses deep content analysis and contextual filters to provide supervisory review of all outbound and inbound communications. Messages are flagged using a lexical system that can be edited to align supervision requirements with internal and external policies.
