A Word From The Chairman – Social media: forcing an evolution of ‘business as usual’

Businesses are gaining confidence in their use of social media. Once centrally controlled, employees are increasingly able to utilise social media to promote and help their business activities.

Whilst this strengthens communications between a business and its publics, it also brings challenges too, such as social media’s role in a time of crisis, issues of hacking accounts, etc. However more serious issues, namely legal compliance and assurance, plus the duty of an employer to provide social media support and analytics tools for its employees, simply have not had the air-time they require.

The first challenge is one of compliance; all companies, whether strictly regulated or not, should be keeping records of all public communication. Social media use by employees, whether using an official account or an account affiliated to a business, counts as a company’s ‘public communication’. Currently there are few tools available to allow these records to be kept.

The second corporate challenge is to provide employees with social media support and analytics tools. These will enable employees to fully understand the impact of their social media use and empower them to engage with impact as well as cost effectively.

And, overlaid on both, is the issue of privacy. Despite the public nature of social media, insight and data from the aggregation of a company’s entire interactions, are a valuable business resource – one which companies should keep private.

Currently, I believe the only viable way to solve these challenges is via SocialSafe. 100% private (data is held locally and not by us), covering all major social networks (Facebook, Facebook Pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, with RSS & Pinterest being added soon), SocialSafe has an unprecedented level of accuracy and completeness.

It provides a cost-effective and reliable resolution to both challenges by providing a 100% archive of an employee’s entire social media history, plus full, deep analysis of the data.

Tools such as SocialSafe will become a standard part of our working lives, both to meet the legal requirements of statutory recording and archiving, as well as to provide tools to maximise the benefits of their social media use. And our challenge at SocialSafe is to assist businesses meet the challenges thrown-up by the social media revolution.