As social media is relatively new and rapidly evolving technology, there are no defined, best practice ways for making and keeping social media information as a business asset.
Organisations also use different social media channels, in a variety of different ways and for various different types of business operations.
Given there are no easy answers for how you should capture and manage your social media information, you should choose the strategies that best meet your business needs and technological environment, while making a full assessment of the potential risks involved.
The table below lists a range of strategies for capturing and keeping your social media information, and the pros and cons associated with each approach.
It is likely that use of a combination of these tools will build the most effective social media information strategy for your organisation.
These tools are back up tools, not information management tools.
Their interfaces and data exports are designed to satisfy IT and backup requirements, not business or information management needs. For example, Facebook data is exported by Backupify in JSON which meets backup needs but which is not readable or accessible for standard business environments.
With these tools, export of information out of social media applications is automated but downloading of this information out of the cloud is not. Downloading and capturing into corporate systems must still be performed as a manual, scheduled process.
As they provide backup services, these tools generally download all your social media information, not information from a specific time period. The same legacy data will generally be downloaded each time you do a backup, resulting in significant amounts of duplication for high transaction accounts.
These services also change. For example, in late 2012 Backupify announced that it would no longer provide backup services for LinkedIn accounts.
Application specific tools (like Instaport which exports images in Instagram) are available for information export.
For images, you may need to assess whether full metadata attached to each image, such as location coding is maintained through export process.
For images, export format may be limited (for example, Instaport exports images as 612 x 612 pixels) and may be smaller with lesser image quality than the original image.
Export is often limited to specific formats. For example, WordPress version 3.8.1 exports all content only in XML.
Export is primarily designed to carry data from one blog or wiki version to another, not for business reuse or ongoing information management purposes. Information may require subsequent processing to render it in formats suitable for specific business use.
Rather than rely on business areas to make and keep business information of their social media activities, records staff can deploy social media dashboards and monitoring tools to monitor all internal social media accounts and to export the information from these accounts as required.
It is very important that you keep an eye on any information management solutions you implement for your social media. Many of the free online services that are available offer very good and useful functionality but these technologies are evolving rapidly.
A solution that suits you today may evolve into something different tomorrow or a solution that exists today may disappear tomorrow.
Many free services are experimenting with formats, functionalities and services and the capacities they offer may change quite regularly.
All the free services are ultimately actually commercial operations and so the services they offer will be driven by business imperatives. For instance, Backupify announced in December 2012 that they will no longer be providing backups of LinkedIn data. Increasingly their corporate revenue is coming through backup for enterprise-based SaaS applications. They are therefore focussing less of their resources on consumer back up requirements and more on corporate requirements.
Therefore be very aware of change and vulnerabilities in this space and monitor whatever services you deploy to ensure they continue to meet your business needs.
One organisation, when seeking community consultation via social media, directed people back to its organisational blog to provide feedback. The blog was set up with an RSS feed so that any comments received on it were emailed automatically to relevant staff. Staff were able to capture these emails into their corporate records system, based on existing processes and procedures.
Congratulations on a great post Kate! It's clear cut, canvasses the options and doesn't cloud the issue using academic speak.
We've been trialing using Hyper Alerts for a subscription fee of $6 per month for our Facebook pages – we've subscribed our publicly accessible addresses and receive weekly digest emails which render nicely in email, capture into our EDRMS TRIM and are text searchable.
Archive Social pricing starts at $149 per month.. massive price difference. The bottom line is having an automated solution that can deal with capturing responses to threads 3 months after the thread started. Automation is the only workable option.