FINRA recently released Notice 11-39, further clarifying requirements to preserve social media and website content. This guidance builds on the previous Notice 10-6 in which FINRA initially provided guidance on social media.

Here’s some main points discussed in Notice 11-39:

• You must preserve any business related web content, be it on websites, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, LinkedIn or any other social network.
• In accordance with SEA Rule 17a-4, records must be preserved for three years — the first two years of content must be easily accessible.
• Record keeping requirements do not differ for static and interactive content — both must be preserved in accordance with SEA Rule 17a-4.
• Don’t use technology that automatically erases or deletes the content of an electronic communication as this would “preclude the ability of the firm to retain the communications in compliance with their obligations under SEA Rule 17a-4.”
• What you link to matters: “A firm should not include a link on its website
  if there are any red flags that indicate the linked site contains false or misleading content.”

FINRA’s repeated notices about social media and online content reinforce the sense that these forms of content are front of mind for FINRA. In fact, in Smarsh’s 2011 Electronic Communications Compliance Survey 56.3% of compliance officers reported having pages from their website audited (22% reported being audited for social media).

The message is this: FINRA is paying more and more attention to your interactive presence (social media, blogs, websites, wikis, etc.). Make sure you’re archiving what you’re doing on the web.

Iterasi Provides Best-In-Breed FINRA Compliance

If you need to comply with FINRA and SEC guidelines look no further than Iterasi’s suite of web archiving services. Capabilities include:

• Archive content across the web — from websites to social media to blogs and employee satellite sites and web presences we can archive what you need.
• Organize, search, curate, and audit in one console — One glance at our user console and you’ll begin to understand how capturing all your web content in one archive will save you time and positively impact the compliance side of your business.
• Professional litigation and compliance power — from custom retention schedules to exporting data to legal hold and more; we’ve got the tools you need.

Contact us to learn more about how Iterasi’s services can make your compliance operations more comprehensive and efficient.

Today we are excited to announce our partnership with Reed Technology and Information Services, a member of the LexisNexis group, to bring to market a comprehensive web archiving service for corporations, government, and professional services firms. The new service is called Reed Technology Web Archiving Services powered by Iterasi.

“We are excited to work with Reed Technology to provide Web Archiving Services to the corporate, professional services and government markets,” said Pete Grillo, CEO of Iterasi. “Our alliance allows us to combine our ‘best-of-breed’ Web archiving technology with Reed Tech’s established digital content management strengths and proven track record of service.”

This web archiving service comes at just the right time for these markets since web archiving is becoming such an essential business need. As Michael Osterman, an Internet and Web 2.0 industry analyst with Osterman Research, puts it:

“Corporations, government and professional services firms are making increasing use of online media to communicate with their customers and constituents about products, services, rules, regulations, and processes. Just as the archiving of email communications has become a ‘Best Practice,’ the now emerging need to archive Web content is on the same trajectory to also become a ‘Best Practice’.”

Find Out More

We’re very excited about this partnership! You can find out more at the Reed Technology Web Archiving Services powered by Iterasi website. Or you can see the press release here: Reed Tech Web Archiving Services Press Release

I stumbled across an interesting article discussing the future of records management from CMS Wire.  The article discusses how spending on records management will rise significantly. Here’s some good points the article makes:

“Recent events like the BP oil spill, the banking crisis and high profile government email leaks have focused executive-level attention on records management.”

“The priority given to records management over the past two year has increased in 80% of companies, with a corresponding planned increase in spending on records management software in over half those organizations.”

“In general, retention policies are quite good around office documents, but considerably less so around newer Enterprise 2.0 technologies or social media content.”

I recommend you check out this article at CMS Wire as well as the study it’s based on, they have some good graphs that help break down the data a bit.

What’s your web records management policy? How are you protecting yourself from the huge costs of e-discovery? We can help you keep records of all your web content in a compliant, easy to use, searchable web-based application. Please contact us for more information.

Here’s an interesting story pointing towards the ubiquity of the internet, and specifically social networks, in court cases:

litigants in a court case beware! your adversary may be allowed to view all of your postings, including private and deleted ones, if they bear any relation to the court case. in the first case of its kind yesterday, a suffolk county ny judge, in romano v. steelcase, inc., allowed a defendant in a personal injury lawsuit to obtain access to the facebook profile of the plaintiff suing them. the court held that since the plaintiff put her physical health at issue by suing, she could not restrict the defendant from obtaining evidence that might support or contradict her claims. supreme court judge allen spinner reasoned -i think completely correctly – that social networking sites are not private lockboxes where you store your most intimate secrets; in fact their privacy policies tell you that they are public spaces. therefore he said:

“plaintiff has no legitimate reasonable expectation of privacy.”

what do you do when you need to bring online evidence into court?

when you need to add webpages to your case what technology will you use? just a screenshot? a “print-out” straight from the browser? these technologies are flawed in more ways than one.

iterasi’s web archiving tools enable you to create valid, digital carbon copy archives of web records to include in your case. create archives, search through archives, schedule regular archives…

Want to find out more? contact us today to discuss how to get started.

We’re excited to announce a partnership with the National Technical Information Service of the US Department of Commerce (NTIS) to enable us to work together to provide web archiving and web information services to agencies of the federal government.

Archiving web records has become a requirement for both government and private organizations as web communication continues to grow as a central communications channel. As USA.gov states: “All federal public websites must comply with existing laws and regulations related to the management of public web records. This includes the need for organizations to comply with NARA guidance related to web records…”

Working together with NTIS we’ll be able to provide the technology and support the agencies of the federal government need to meet their regulatory requirements. As the Director of NTIS, Bruce Borzino, stated:

“NTIS partnering with Iterasi is a step forward in NTIS’ constant endeavor to ensure the capture and archiving of this nation’s vast wealth of scientific and technical information available on the web.”

To find out more about this great partnership you can visit this website: NTIS & Iterasi Partnership Information. Or you can read the press release.

I stumbled across a great quote about finding the balance in your eDiscovery policy. The quote is from the Honorable Shira A. Scheindlin in the preamble of Harkabi v. Sandisk Corp, 08 Civ. 8203 (WHP) (S.D.N.Y. Aug, 23, 2010).

“Electronic discovery requires litigants to scour disparate data storage mediums and formats for potentially relevant documents. That undertaking involves dueling considerations: thoroughness and cost. This motion illustrated the perils of failing to strike the proper balance.”

To read more about this case, check out Clearwell’s Blog post Sandisk Fails to Find Proper E-Discovery Balance – Gets Sanctioned.

Don’t be caught underprepared for your litigation.

With Iterasi it’s never been easier to put your eDiscovery and records retention policies into action and start archiving your web presence!

To get started learning more about Iterasi and archiving your websites, contact us today →

Photo Credit: Subspace

Judge Paul Grimm (D.MD) is something of a celebrity in e-Discovery circles, and his latest ruling will give you a good idea why. In the case Victor Stanley, Inc. v. Creative Pipe et al. Judge Grimm encounters richly comedic and seriously sad spoliation… so much so that those found responsible were ordered to jail. Judge Grimm calls these guys “the gang that couldn’t spoliate straight.”

Judge Grimm found the case to be:

”…the single most egregious example of spoliation that I have encountered in any case that I have handled or in any case described in the legion of spoliation cases I have read in nearly fourteen years on the bench”

Of particular interest here is a great PDF Judge Grimm puts together to illustrate spoliation sanctions by circuit.

I encourage you to check out Ralph Losey’s excellent summary of this case for more insight and hilarious facts about the ruling: Victor Stanley II – Judge Grimm Ruling.

An interesting article was just published about the crossroads of social networking and worker’s compensation law. Social networking and social digital communication in general is somewhat new to case law, so the examples and guidance in this article are very enlightening.

Here’s one example from the article:

In EEOC v. Simply Storage Management, LLC, an employment law case, a magistrate judge ordered employees to produce social networking profile information from their Facebook and MySpace accounts in response to a discovery request. The EEOC filed a sexual harassment complaint on behalf of two employees against their supervisor. It requested a discovery conference because counsel disagreed about the proper scope of discovery involving social networking documents, including items from Facebook and MySpace. The EEOC objected to the demand for the production of all documents related to the plaintiffs‘ social networking accounts and to deposition testimony about the employees‘ social networking profiles on the grounds that the requests were overbroad, not relevant, unduly burdensome, harassing, and embarrassing toward the employees. Magistrate Judge Debra Lynch found that the standard for discovery‘s scope is broad, and noted that where relevance is in doubt, the court should be permissive.

However, she also emphasized that the scope of discovery is not limitless. The EEOC argued that discovery of Facebook and MySpace profiles should be limited to information that directly relates to issues raised in the complaint.47 Ultimately, Magistrate Judge Lynch found all social networking content revealing, relating, or simply referring to allegations raised in the complaint to be discoverable. Judge Lynch also found that the fact that a user‘s profile is private and not available to the public does not shield information in that user‘s profile from discovery.

You can download this article here: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1675026

photo credit: *Grant*

Gartner released 5 predictions about how enterprises will use social software in the future. Use of social media and technologies that connect people has been increasing rapidly, with Facebook announcing more than 500 million active users, and enterprises are keen to interact and grow business through these channels.

“A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business,” said Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner.

Gartner offers five key predictions for social software:

1: By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.
“The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities,” said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner.

2: By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.
“Enterprise users want to use microblogging for many of the same reasons that consumers do to share quick insights, to keep up with what colleagues are doing, to get quick answers to questions and so on.”

3: Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.
“Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.”

4: Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.
“Gartner expects more end users to spend significant time experiencing the collaborative tools on [mobile] devices.”

5: Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.
“For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.”

This is an interesting collection of predictions, and I think they get it pretty right. No matter the form it takes, enterprises will increasingly adopt social media and social software in general.

If you use social media and require an archiving and records retention solution, please contact us to learn more about our products to keep your organization within compliance.

April Edmonds, a Web technology analyst for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has put together a social media toolkit to help government agencies understand how to effectively use social media.

This iToolkit has specific information to Florida but any government entity is welcome to use any of the resources provided. This iToolKit is provided to you based on experiences.

There’s a lot of great info in the toolkit, including topics like Blogging, Facebook, Legal, Lessons Learned, etc.

If you’re interested in social media for government agencies, I recommend you check out the Social Media Toolkit.

Note: If you are a government agency requiring archiving and retention of your social media, please contact us. Our web archiving tools will help you meet your regulatory requirements.