WHITEPAPER

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE

Authors: Eric Schwartzman of Comply Socially Jeremy Humphries of Farmers Insurance Chris Kieff of Sprinklr Uyen Nguyen of Sprinklr

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BANK OF AMERICA VS. THE CONNECTED CONSUMER

RISKS FACING CORPORATIONS TODAY

SOCIAL MEDIA COMPLIANCE CHECKLIST

COMPLIANCE GROCERY LIST TEAR-OUT SHEET

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT BEING COMPLIANT: A LESSON FROM PINK SLIME

SOCIAL COMPLIANCE IS EVERYONE’S BUSINESS

YOU NEED INFRASTRUCTURE TO FUNCTION AT THE SPEED OF SOCIAL

CONCLUSION

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

INTRODUCTIONCompliance is nothing new. Companies have dealt with regulations for as long as there have been companies. They know that there are certain things they cannot say or do. They also know the costly repercussions of not adhering to these regulations.

Then came the age of social.

Social media changes things. It’s a wild, wild world driven by real-time conversations and controlled by connected consumers. Social media seems lawless to regulated companies that were built upon a foundation of structured, safe interaction. The more regulated the industry, the scarier and more ungovernable real-time conversations can appear.

As a result of their fears, some brands retreated into their shells. They adopted highly restrictive technology, thinking that the best route is to hide from the public eye — to do and say nothing at all. When the social age came knocking, these companies locked their doors, thinking that safety could only be found in doing nothing. Sure, they missed out on the benefits of social, but better safe than sorry. Right?

There’s a problem. Today’s connected customers will talk about your brand regardless of whether you choose to join the conversation. Doing and saying nothing won’t spare you. And in a social world driven by viral stories, doing and saying nothing will actually make things worse. That’s a lesson a lot of companies have learned the hard way.

BANK OF AMERICA VS. THE CONNECTED CONSUMEROne of the nation’s largest banks came face-to-face with the power of the connected consumer a few years ago.

It all started when the federal government lowered the cap on ‘swipe fees’ banks could charge merchants from 44 cents to 21 cents. Bank of America (BOA), the nation’s second largest lender stood to lose big time — about $2 billion annually. Rather than absorbing the loss, the banking giant wanted to make up for lost ground by charging customers a $5 monthly debit card usage fee.

It was the fee heard around the World Wide Web.

Within 24 hours of the leaked story, news outlets pumped out nearly 2,000 articles on the topic. People around the country took to social media to express their discontent. One college graduate even started an online petition against the corporation. The David vs. Goliath-esque effort gathered over 300,000 signatures.

In the wake of the economic crisis — caused by financial juggernauts such as BOA — this was evidently the last straw. Consumers made the message pretty clear: they’d rather leave BOA than pay another fee.

Over one-third of customers polled said they would change banks due to unreasonable fees. BOA had 57 million customers at the time, the majority of whom used debit cards. The company was looking at $3 billion in annual revenue if the fees went into effect. This would more than cover the $2 billion deficit. But the company faced a much deeper loss due to unhappy customers.

According to research from J.D. Power and Associates, two-thirds of people who threaten to switch banks will actually go through with it. So although the banking giant stood to make $3 billion annually, they also stood to lose nearly 20 million customers.

One month after the story emerged, BOA scrapped the debit fee plan altogether. Other financial organizations followed suit.

The story of BOA is a testament to the power of the consumer in the social age. Consumers of yesteryear didn’t have an outlet to voice their opinions. Today’s connected consumers, however, have a megaphone and they’re not afraid to use it.

TODAY’S CONNECTED CONSUMERS, HOWEVER, HAVE A MEGAPHONE AND THEY’RE NOT AFRAID TO USE IT.

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

RISKS FACING CORPORATIONS TODAYMany brands find themselves natively posting to social media sites or using low-cost, consumer-grade tools. The problem here: consumer-grade tools are meant to help people post to one or two social accounts. They’re not meant for use by global enterprises that need to post to thousands of social accounts with comprehensive record keeping and control. This disjointed approach leaves the enterprise ill-equipped to respond to situations that require rapid, coordinated action.

It exposes them to many risks:

• multiple individuals with admin-level access to social media pages

• access management in multiple places (i.e. within each individual network) making account adds, moves and changes inconvenient and prone to error

• inability to enforce review and approval of messages prior to posting

• poor or non-existent auditing ability

• limited or no automated scheduling

• lack of archival capabilities

As a result, these enterprises leave themselves exposed to multiple instances of financial and reputational damage:

• an individual with admin-level access has his/her social media network account hacked

• unreviewed posts containing false, misleading or mistaken information is published from corporate accounts

• a disgruntled (ex-)employee with admin-level access posts disparaging or confidential information

SOCIAL MEDIA COMPLIANCE CHECKLISTIn order to avoid the reputational risks out there, brands have to select enterprise-grade technologies. When shopping for a vendor, they should keep the following considerations in mind.

Editor's note: If you’re in a hurry and want to bypass the next 1,822 words, a simplified and printable checklist is available on page 8.

ABILITY TO MONITOR, MODERATE AND ENFORCE CONTROLS AT SCALE

Time after time, brands have stumbled into vulnerable situations on social media — whether it’s a disgruntled employee, radical political hacker or careless intern. Proper management of users and roles would help brands avoid this issue. That’s why it’s the first step in being safe on social media.

Do you have role-based permissions in your platform?

User roles mean that each member of your team has access to only the features, functions and social media accounts assigned to them. This reduces the number of users with direct access to your native accounts. If you oversee a team of 10 community managers, for example, you can designate all their accounts as ‘approval mandatory’ for posting to social networks. This mitigates the risks of publishing rogue content.

Is your role-based system configurable?

The system should be capable of being customized to align with your organization and its nomenclatures. Rather than forcing your team members to fit into pre-configured platform roles, the platform should map to your organization’s existing setup.

Do you have Single Sign On in your platform?

Single Sign On means that each user has a separate login that grants them access to multiple social accounts. Each login can be configured to determine a user’s access to features, functions and social media accounts. Not only does it make things easier for users — eliminating the exhaustive process of memorizing dozens of passwords — it also ensures a higher level of security for the brand. Fewer people will have direct control over social media accounts.

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Does your platform connect with the organization’s active directory?

If there’s a high turnover rate for your industry, and your company has 100,000+ employees, you’ll need an active directory to automatically disconnect employees’ access to confidential materials. Your platform should connect to that active directory, guaranteeing that once an employee leaves the company, they’ll no longer have access to your company’s social accounts.

Can you enforce control across hundreds (or thousands) of social accounts?

Enterprises don’t just have an account for Facebook and another for Twitter; they have a Facebook account for every brand under the parent umbrella, a Twitter account to complement each of those, and so on. Some brands manage over 20,000 unique social accounts. Your platform needs the ability to sit on top of and manage all of these accounts.

ABILITY TO MONITOR AND REMEDIATE RISKS

Crises are inevitable. Humans are prone to errors and thus will make mistakes no matter how well you prepare. So when these less-than-desirable situations happen, you need the ability to mitigate disaster.

Do you have proactive reputation monitoring?

Your platform should automatically monitor all outbound posts and scan them for potentially damaging content. It should be your brand’s 24/7 watchman against inappropriate tweets. When an issue is discovered, your platform should prevent problematic content from being published, routing these items to an approval queue.

Does your platform watch out for external content?

Your system should track messages that are posted outside of the platform. If someone hacks your native social media account, for example, your platform should zero in on these forbidden posts and either delete the them or notify admin-level users. Your platform’s defensive wall should extend way beyond the platform itself.

Do you have a ‘kill switch’?

Even if you create totally appropriate content, you’re still not completely safe from reputational damage. Take, for example, a tragic event. In times likes this, your brand needs the ability to quickly halt scheduled social messaging. Even if these tweets/posts/shares all follow brand guidelines, they are not appropriate given the situation. Social faux-pas have resulted in reputational damage for a number of big brands, but are incredibly easy to prevent with a kill switch.

Do you have an alert system?

Your rules engine should have an alert system built in that notifies all the right people when issues arise. These alerts should practically scream at you when something out of the normal is happening around your brand.

Is your alert system volumetric-based?

As the story of Bank of America illustrated, viral content and ideas can really shake up an enterprise. Your alert system should offer volumetric-based triggers that fire off emails and in-platform alerts if there’s a spike in activity around your brand. These alerts are your canaries in the coalmine for possible social media crises.

Is your alert system influencer-based?

If an influential figure — news outlet, reporter, blogger, celebrity, etc. — mentions your brand, that could be the precursor to viral content. Your alert system should monitor for these conversations, enabling you to stop issues before they become problems.

EMBEDDED WORKFLOW THAT AUTOMATES REVIEWS AND COMPLIANCE PROCESSES

Process is everything. Unfortunately, social moves so quickly that people often ignore process. Being socially compliant doesn’t mean abandoning the necessary checkpoints, it means streamlining the process. You need an enterprise level of software administration.

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

Do you have ‘intelligent’ approval workflow?

Your approval system needs to provide automatic routing of approvals based on different (and customizable) settings. If a user creates a post on Facebook pertaining to a certain campaign, the post should be routed to a certain approval path — involving all necessary, and only necessary, individuals for sign-off. If the next post generated pertains to a different campaign, the post should automatically (hence the intelligent part) follow a completely different approval path and only involve individuals associated with that new campaign.

Intelligent routing saves the organization time and money by efficiently getting posts to the correct destinations. No more mass-email and version-control issues. Most importantly, intelligent routing minimizes reputational risks by ensuring that all posts are approved by the right people prior to publishing.

Does your platform provide an audit trail?

Do you know who sent a specific tweet? In addition to managing the approval workflow, your platform should keep a record of all actions and people involved with a message. Your audit trail should outline who reviewed the message, the date and time they approved the message, and any comments they made at that time. Enhanced tracking helps to minimize the brand’s reputational risk by allowing management to identify and correct gaps in the approval process.

SOCIAL ARCHIVAL CAPABILITIES

The social world is ephemeral. Tweets, posts and comments can easily be deleted. But for legal protection, you need a way to make social conversations more permanent. Hence the need for social archives.

How far back does your platform store social conversations?

Does your platform store conversations for 11 days or 11 years? If you only have 11 days' worth of data storage, you’re helpless in a legal situation requiring you to outline what one of your social media service agents said to a customer last year.

How accessible are your social archives?

It’s unbelievably difficult to keep track of social messages when you receive thousands on a daily basis. Having 11 years’ worth of stored conversations is great. But if you can’t find them, they’re useless. You need the ability to store an infinite amount of data coupled with the ability to pull up a specific conversation at the drop of a hat.

ENTERPRISE-LEVEL SECURITY AND ACCOUNT PROTECTION

People cut corners, you can’t afford to be vulnerable because of it. When shopping for a vendor, make sure their product is built to provide a superior level of enterprise-grade security.

“Is your information confidential?” “Do you have a contingency plan?” “Have your operational procedures been tested?”

You can ask your vendor myriad questions regarding the security of its offering, and it can vehemently say “yes” each time. But in order to be sure, it needs to have proof that it has been tested and verified by an independent auditor. Hence the need for SOC 1 TYPE 1 and SOC 1 TYPE 2 Certification:

Does it have SOC 1 Type 2 Certification?

If you’re using social predominantly for customer service, a breakdown in the system means you won’t be able to service your customers. Unhappy customers might impact your bottom line. Thus, you need your social solution vendor to be dependable.

Your vendor not only needs to have policies and procedures in place outlining the effectiveness of its operations, the vendor needs to test these policies.

Having SOC 1 Type 2 means that the vendor has the necessary operations policies and procedures in place, and that these have been audited and approved by a third party organization.

Does it have SOC 2 Type 2 Certification?

SOC 2 Type 2 outlines the security, confidentiality and privacy of your vendor. This means that the vendor is protected against unauthorized access, the confidential

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

information you store within the system is protected, and any personal information (e.g. customer data) collected, used and stored in the system is also protected.

SOCIAL NETWORK AND APPLICATION SUPPORT

Global companies need global support. This means having the ability to post to international social channels and in different languages. Without global capabilities, scalability isn’t possible.

Does your platform have comprehensive network coverage?

Being able to post to the major U.S. networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) is crucial to your brand’s social success, but what about Weibo, Tencent or VK? If you’re a global brand, you need global network coverage.

Does your platform support multiple languages?

The United States isn’t the only social media market you should be worrying about. As your social brand becomes a global social powerhouse, you’ll need a platform that can support other languages — empowering your local markets to be social on behalf of the brand.

Does your platform support preferred partnerships?

This includes partnerships with the major social media players: Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Program, LinkedIn’s Partnership Network, Twitter’s Certified Program.

ENTERPRISE-WIDE ENFORCEMENT OF COMPLIANCE

Having a compliant listening tool is great. So is having one for reporting or engagement. But if all these tools aren’t connected, you’re not really compliant. Compliance solutions in isolation won’t help you ensure compliance across the enterprise. You need the ability to integrate compliance into every aspect of your social presence.

Is your reporting tied to your executive dashboards?

If you can’t see or understand what’s going on amidst the millions of social data points related to your brand, then you can’t take action. You can’t participate in a safe way. Comprehensive executive dashboards and compliant reporting will help you both manage your operations on a day-to-day basis, as well as provide insight into the inner workings of your programs. You’ll then be able to communicate this to other parts of your organization and third parties alike.

Is every aspect of your social infrastructure compliant?

Having a compliant solution for listening is great. But if you choose to purchase a compliant listening solution and are using something else for social engagement, is the latter also compliant? If you answer “no,” then your social infrastructure — all the different components that make up your brand’s social presence — is vulnerable. You basically have a house with the door made out of adamantium and walls made of papier-mâché. In order to be a socially compliant enterprise, you need a compliant infrastructure.

Every one of these elements matters. If one is out of alignment, then your organization is at risk. To help ensure your organization is safe, we made a simple social compliance grocery list.

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

SOCIAL COMPLIANCE GROCERY LIST

Ability to monitor, moderate and enforce controls at scale

Ability to monitor and remediate risks

Embedded workflow that automates reviews and compliance processes

Social archival capabilities

Enterprise-level security and account protection

Enterprise-wide enforcement of compliance

Social network and application support

Do you have user role-based permissions?Is your role-based system configurable?Do you have Single Sign On?Does your platform connect to an active directory?Can you enforce control across hundreds (or thousands) of accounts?

Do you have proactive reputation monitoring?Does your platform monitor external content?Do you have a ‘kill switch’?Do you have an alert system?Is your alert system volumetric-based?Is your alert system influencer-based?

Do you have ‘intelligent’ approval workflow?Does your platform provide an audit trail?

How far does your platform store social conversations?How accessible are your social archives?

Do you have SOC 1 Type 2 Certification?Do you have SOC 2 Type 2 Certification?

Is your reporting dashboard tied to your monitoring and engagement dashboards?Is every aspect of your social infrastructure compliant?

Does your platform have comprehensive network coverage?Does your platform support multiple languages?Does your platform support preferred partnerships?

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT BEING COMPLIANT: A LESSON FROM PINK SLIMEThe story of Pink Slime is a prime example of how compliance is a necessary first step in being a social enterprise, but that it’s not all that matters.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, it revolves around lean, finely textured beef (LFTB) — infamously dubbed ‘Pink Slime’ — created by processing low-grade beef trimmings and other meat by-products.

The product at the center of it all had actually been widely used for over two decades prior to the controversy. Even the USDA dubbed it safe for consumption. Until social media, Pink Slime operated under the radar and could be found pretty much everywhere — schools, grocery stores, even Happy Meals.

That all changed in early March 2012 when mommy blogger Bettina Siegal started a Change.org petition asking the USDA to ban the filler from schools. It gathered over 200,000 signatures within just a few days. Around the same time, ABC News ran an investigative segment on the widespread usage of Pink Slime.

Beef Products, Inc., the main producer of LFTB, did nothing to address the situation, convinced that there was no ‘meat’ to the accusations. After all, they were technically compliant. The story didn’t die down. BPI eventually launched a consumer education program and took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal weeks later in a last-ditch attempt to show that the product was “100 percent beef in every regard.”

They did so in vain. The public had already sworn off LFTB. Schools, supermarkets and franchise restaurants across the country announced they would no longer serve products containing LFTB.

Sales of their products plummeted. And less than a month after the ABC NEWS story aired, BPI filed for bankruptcy, citing the Pink Slime uproar as the cause.

BPI went from an enterprise with $650 million in annual revenue to being infamous for only two words. Pink. Slime.

There are a few lessons to be learned from the tale of Pink Slime:• negative perception in social media can cripple your

business• governmental fines are a serious concern, but

wounds caused by reputational damage cut the deepest

• in the age of the connected consumer, not engaging in social conversations won’t protect you — in fact, it’s quite the opposite

Even the perception of not being compliant can cause organizational ruin. So although it’s important to be compliant, you can’t just stop there. You need to manage your brand’s reputation. This can only be achieved by actively engaging in social conversations.

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

SOCIAL MEDIA COMPLIANCE IS EVERYONE'S BUSINESSSocial media compliance isn’t just for public companies, financial institutions and healthcare providers.

Every organization looking to get value from social media needs a strategy for managing the risks, because no employer is immune to the considerable attorney’s fees, legal fines and regulatory penalties that can result from non-compliant use.

Social networks don’t just enable real-time conversations. They leave behind a trail of digital breadcrumbs that can be found by attorneys, regulators and law enforcement officials and used as evidence in a court of law. When you tweet something, you forfeit any reasonable expectation of privacy you may have had.

Social media also blurs the boundaries that previously existed between our personal and professional identities. Most employers attempt to manage this quandary by asking employees to use disclaimers like “opinions are my own” on any personal social networking profile they also use for work-related conversations.

Those disclaimers do provide some clarification, but they don’t really protect anyone from liability. If employees defend their boss or discuss something work-related on their personal social networking accounts with people who know where they work, they can say their opinions are their own, but others may still perceive their opinions as being influenced by their employment status.

The real challenge of effective social marketing today is that building visibility and credibility relies on consistently engaging a broad community with your posts. Reach and frequency increase with the number of likes, comments and retweets a conversations attracts. But how many people engage everyone all the time? Being amazing is not a reliable engagement strategy.

The more employees who use social media to get their jobs done, the more organizational intelligence gets transferred to the social web, and the further that information carries. So effective social marketing is about using social media at scale. The more people that get involved, the better it works.

But not everyone is skilled in the business of public disclosure. It makes sense to trust public relations professionals to manage a brand’s social media profiles, because they specialize in managing an organization’s public record. Most employees do not.

Employees need to be taught how to distinguish between conversations that can happen in public on the social web and conversations that need to be kept in person-to-person channels like instant messages, email and (dare I say) fax.

Employers that scale social media throughout the organization. chart are 25% more productive[1], 26% more profitable[2] and their employees are 50% more engaged[3]. Independent of sales and marketing activities, that is the business case for wider use of social media throughout the workforce. It’s not just a bigger bullhorn. We’ve only just scratched the surface of how activity streams integrated into workflow processes will fundamentally change the way we collaborate.

ERIC SCHWARTZMANFOUNDER AND CEOCOMPLY SOCIALLY

Eric is CEO of social media training provider Comply Socially, which maintains the world’s broadest, deepest catalog of live, virtual instructor-led and self-paced social media training courses.

Twitter: @ericschwartzman LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/schwartzman

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And it will. It’s that big a deal. But the very public, discoverable nature of social media puts employers in a tough spot. On the one hand, to reap measurable returns, they want broad usage throughout their workforce. On the other hand, they need a way to manage the risks associated with that practice.

Up to now, most employers relied on social media policies, but only two out of every 1,000 employee read standard contracts[4]. That makes these types of contracts good for justifying penalties in the event of misuse, but pretty much useless at changing employee behavior. How can anyone comply with a policy they haven’t read?

Meanwhile, organizations are getting nabbed fairly regularly these days for non-compliant online behavior. Did you know you can be fined $8,000 per incident for publishing an image without permission, $11,000 per incident for tweeting on behalf of the boss without disclosing your employee status, and $16,000 per incident for sending out email blasts that violate the CAN-SPAM Act?

Think that’s small potatoes? Here are some costly mistakes of others:

• $250,000 for buying fake social media endorsements

• $2.2 million for digital sexual harassment between co-workers

• $3.2 million in fines for illicit online data collection practices

Could something like this happen to you? The more employees who engage on your behalf, the greater the risk. And the more you control it, the more liable you are. Overbearing social media policies are not the answer because they increase employer liability and chill social media usage among employees.

But unlike sexual harassment, the upside of getting social right is increased productivity, profitability and employee engagement — these are real, measurable gains. For most organizations, the risk of blocking social media outweighs the threat of misuse.

The only truly sustainable approach to putting social media to good use inside organizations is eliminating knowledge gaps and minimizing those risks through education, rather than punitive actions. The answer is social media literacy and compliance training, assessment and certification for all employees. When enterprise-wide social media literacy and compliance training is in place — and everyone knows the difference between what can be public and what should be private — social media goes from drain to gain.

[1] Capgemini Consulting/MIT Center for Digital Business, Digital Advantage: How Digital Leaders Outperform their Peers in Every Industry, Nov. 5, 2012

[2] McKinsey & Company, The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies, June 2012

[3] Weber Shandwick/KRC Research, Employees Rising: Seizing the Opportunity in Employee Activism, April 2014

[4] NYU, Does Anyone Read the Fine Print? Testing a Law and Economics Approach to Standard Form Contracts, October, 2009

Self-paced, 30-minute Social Media Privacy Awareness Training Course from Comply Socially covers personal privacy, ownership of friends and followers and the types of posts your employer can legally monitor. All rights reserved.

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

YOU NEED INFRASTRUCTURE TO FUNCTION AT THE SPEED OF SOCIALOne of the biggest challenges for Farmers Insurance, and for most highly regulated industries, is compliance. Social is fluid, unexpected and spontaneous. However, if you are in a highly regulated industry, you cannot always turn on a dime. The road from content creation to content publication is long and winding due to the numerous compliance checkpoints.

It would seem that real-time social and corporate compliance simply cannot coexist, leading companies to hesitate in adopting social for their business. However, establishing a social presence in the business community is quickly becoming the standard to maintain relevancy and success. Like current businesses that fail to create a website, in the future, a lack of social presence could mean the downfall for many companies.

Companies need to be social. This does not mean abandoning the necessary checkpoints, but rather, learning how to streamline the process. That is where infrastructure comes in. What exactly constitutes a strong infrastructure? Developing clear, comprehensive guidelines, building strong internal relationships and, most importantly, investing in technology.

It takes time to put all of these things in place, but it is a tremendously important investment – an investment that pays dividends once established.

Infrastructure allows for order and efficiency. It ensures that all parties involved have a role, and that all roles are clearly defined. At Farmers, we can turn around content – with approval from all necessary parties – in less than 24 hours. Before our current infrastructure, the process could take up to a week. People simply did not know at which point they were supposed to provide feedback, leading to a process that was clunky.

Infrastructure also allows for adaptability, which is crucial when it comes to being social. We want to plan calendars months in advance but, in reality, it is necessary to have a mix of both evergreen and timely content pieces. In order to leverage a current event, a quick turn-around time is essential. This is only possible with a solid infrastructure.

In short: infrastructure is necessary to function at the speed of social.

JEREMY HUMPHRIESSOCIAL MEDIA MANAGERFARMERS INSURANCE

As the integration manager, Jeremy is responsible for executing social strategy focused on integrating relevant business units across the Farmers enterprise. Prior to Farmers, Jeremy lived in Germany, where he worked for Amphenol-Tuchel as a Marketing Intern. In his spare time, he enjoys live music and craft beers, sometimes simultaneously.

Twitter: @jerhumphries LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jerhumphries

INFRASTRUCTURE ALSO ALLOWS FOR ADAPTABILITY, WHICH IS CRUCIAL WHEN IT COMES TO BEING SOCIAL.

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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE SOCIAL COMPLIANCE | May 7, 2014

CONCLUSIONThe social age disrupts — maybe even shatters completely — the status quo. It demands that all companies participate in real-time conversations, even if that is the antithesis of their natural instincts. Companies don’t have a choice when it comes to being social. This doesn’t mean abandoning all the necessary checkpoints; it means equipping your organization to effectively and efficiently do both. It means building your social presence on top of a compliant infrastructure.

In order to survive the age of the connected consumer, companies — highly regulated ones or otherwise — have to be social. The ‘avoid at all costs’ attitude that highly regulated companies have toward social media is no longer sustainable. They have to find ways to minimize risk while maximizing the upside of social media.

Being social isn’t a choice. Being compliant isn’t a choice. Doing both is a requirement.