Social Business: Solving Compliance Challenges

By Joe Shepley (@joeshepley) Oct 31, 2011

In my last post, Social Business: Compliant Communities as a Strategic Differentiator, I talked about how the relationship of compliance to communities (and all social business activities as well) is undergoing an important shift. From being a roadblock initially, to becoming a challenge that simply made going social more difficult for organizations, compliance today presents a distinctive opportunity for organizations to differentiate themselves from the competition.

Compliance today is a barrier to entry, one that, because of the range of challenges it poses to organizations looking to go social, offers the possibility of significant returns to those organizations that are able to overcome it before their competitors. Those that don’t will eventually need to address the challenges, but they’ll be playing catch up: the real gains to be had will have been enjoyed by the first-movers in the space.

In the next two posts, I want to take a look at the four steps organizations need to take in order to give themselves the best chance of solving the compliance challenges of going social:

Create a cross-functional body to “own” the problem of social media compliance
Find out what’s happening with social media at all levels of your organization
Focus on creating a reasonable, defensible social media compliance strategy
Manage social media compliance the way you manage traditional compliance

Before I dive in and get specific about each of these four areas, it’s important to say a bit about why organizations find it so challenging to solve the compliance challenges associated with becoming a social business.

Technology

First, as you can see in Figure 1, the landscape of the social technologies available to organizations is complex. There are not only discreet technologies that address each quadrant, but category-spanning offerings that aim to address multiple quadrants (e.g., SharePoint for enterprise collaboration, Jive or IBM connections for social business software, Box.net or SpringCM for cloud content management).

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Figure 1 – Social Business Technology Landscape

At most large organizations, you’ll find at least one solution in play in each quadrant as well as in each of the category-spanning quadrants. And compliance must find a way to allow all of them to operate in accordance with applicable laws and regulations — no mean feat.

Regulation (or Lack of It)

In addition, as you can see in Figure 2, of all the major U.S. regulatory bodies, only FINRA has specifically addressed social media.

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Figure 2 – Existing U.S. Social Media Regulation

This leaves organizations subject to other regulators in a bit of a lurch: their Enterprise 1.0 activities are governed quite specifically by these regulators, who haven’t given them any guidance on their Enterprise 2.0 activities. But they know that regulation is coming on the horizon, and so any of their E2.0 efforts need to anticipate what their regulators may do in the future — again, no mean feat.
Information Complexity

On top of these technical and regulatory challenges, social business content is more complex than traditional electronically stored information (ESI).

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Figure 3 – The Complexity of Social ESI