Pursuant to my earlier posts about the information retention and risk management issues associated with social content -- Poking at the Soft Underbelly of Social Media and Facebook vetting of potential employees - not without some risks to the EMPLOYER -- and continuing to research for my keynote at the Newsgator Collective (#NGcollective) conference, I came across the new ARMA standard for social content.
The name of the standard is Implications of Web-Based, Collaborative Technologies in Records Management and it's worthwhile reviewing for those who care about the social underbelly.
There is much that is useful in the standard. As usual, my starting point is wondering about exactly how far we will be able to extend a paper-based records and retention paradigm that began with the printing press into ever increasing volumes and forms of electronic information (check out Julie Colgan's useful post on this topic, Retention Needs an Enema).
One of the things I worry about is the overlay of additional organizational self-inflicted obligations upon an already ambiguous and strained legal framework. One of the issues that I wrote about in Soft Underbelly was the challenge of extending internal retention requirements to public-facing sites.
There are a couple of points in the standard that frankly seem a little strange to me. And I will confess at this point that I am neither a lawyer nor a records manager, so bear with me.
Here are some of the points, and they center around how an organization should interact with public-facing service providers. A few representative recommendations...
- The organization should have Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with its social media providers to ensure that the hosted content can be made accessible at any time and stored in non-proprietary and editable formats.
- The organization’s SLAs with its social media providers should define how records can be searched, accessed, and made available at the organization’s request.
- The organization’s Service Level Agreements (SLAs) should specify how the service providers store/archive their content.
- The organization’s SLAs should specify how individual pieces of content can be removed and deleted at the organization’s request.
- The organization’s SLAs should specify what the service providers are permitted to do with (how they might use) the organization’s content after it has been deleted from the organization-accessible areas of the provider’s site.
So here's the point that bothers me...
I can certainly see the relevance to providers of hosted services for internal social initiatives. But I have a very hard time seeing the relevance to public-facing social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn). I can see perhaps requiring review of the policies of public-facing social media providers on which your organization has a presence. But the idea that any of us normal people can have an individual Service Level Agreement with the likes of Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter that is anything other than what Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn dictates to us seems unlikely to me.
Being an active user of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn -- where I would venture almost all of the content in question resides -- I can't find anywhere or anyone with whom to even begin a discussion of SLAs. I look forward to my discussion with Mark Zuckerberg about non-proprietary content formats.
And if it's impossible to meet such a recommendation, why start with the assumption that it's even possible? Why start with the assumption that organizations "should" be doing anything other than just determining whether the organization can live with the social provider's policies and practice? And do away with the expectation that an individually appropriate SLA or anything other than acceptance/rejection of the existing policies is in the picture.
Like I said at the beginning, don't get me wrong. A TON of good stuff in the standard; it is certainly way useful given the void that exists. But in whatever version comes next, I'd like a bit more understanding of exactly how to get an SLA with Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter.
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