Don’t ignore corporate social media risks: manage them

International law firm, Fulbright & Jaworski has announced the results of its 2009 Litigation Trends survey, revealing that 52 percent of UK organizations are restricting employee access to social media websites including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Twitter and YouTube.

According to Fulbright, this may be because 18 percent of respondents in the UK reported that in the last year they have been required to produce information from one or more of these sites as part of an eDisclosure request (the identification, preservation and collection of electronically stored information for regulatory and internal investigations and law suits). In the US, this figure stood at four percent.

Information risk specialist Recommind notes that UK firms are facing a ticking time bomb as eDisclosure becomes increasingly common in the UK, and use of social media skyrockets across all industries. Recommind's own research reveals that UK businesses are ill-equipped to cope with this increase - 89 percent of companies have no dedicated guidelines in place to control the use of these tools and, ultimately, the spread of information through these channels.

"Businesses need to wake up to the risks. It's no longer enough just to block employee access to certain sites - these tools are pervasive and staff will always find a way round any restrictions," said Craig Carpenter, VP general counsel at Recommind. "Too many UK organizations are still labouring under the misapprehension that eDisclosure is an American problem, but it is increasingly a universal concern affecting businesses all over the world. With information from social media sites now being required - on top of the already ever-expanding volume of email, documents and other electronically stored information - the potential cost and time implications for dealing with such requests are huge."

Recommind notes that rather than restricting employee access to social media sites, UK firms should ensure these tools and applications are integrated into their corporate information and risk management policies. In this way, businesses will be well prepared should they be required to produce information from these sites within the tight deadlines often set by the investigators or the court.

"The sheer volume of information held by organizations today makes locating and producing any data within a tight timeframe difficult. When we throw social media into the mix, there is the added difficulty of finding information from even more sources and the fact that so many companies have little to no clue about what data is out there, when it was posted, and which site it is on," continued Carpenter. "Ultimately this lax attitude must be addressed, and all businesses should ensure they have corporate guidelines in place and, vitally, the ability to enforce them."

http://www.fulbright.com

http://www.recommind.com

•Date: 20th Oct 2009• Region: UK/World •Type: Article •Topic: Operational risk
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