The use of new digital communication methods is on the rise with no sign of slowing down. However, many organizations that archive email for regulatory compliance, e-discovery and/or records retention have yet to implement similar solutions for the rest of their communications content.

When considering options, a common misconception is that simply extending the scope of existing email-centric systems and practices to now encompass social media and other new communication content types is the answer. Sounds logical, doesn’t it? Simply capture everything into the one system as if it were email, and perform the same types of searches and reviews across all the content in one place and you’ve got your solution.

The reality is, you could do that, but it won’t be the solution you need or want at all.

Let’s take a closer look.

Email-centric archiving products typically necessitate the conversion of social media and other digital communications records from their original unique native formats into a generic email-like format.
In addition to losing valuable context and relevance essential for the review process, altering original messages this way could render them inadmissible later on. Whether you’re supporting your position in a regulatory exam, audit or legal matter, this type of conversion can violate “forensically sound procedures” related to maintaining the “Electronic Chain of Custody.”

Our position is that non-email messages, including those generated with social media applications, should be captured and archived alongside email and other content types in a single archive for compliance supervision, universal search and e-discovery. They should also remain in their original unique communication formats and not be altered.

Not just to eliminate the regulatory or legal risk associated with altering the messages, but to also maximize overall efficiency and performance when working with the messages as well. You will produce faster, more accurate and relevant search results, retain the conversational context of these communications, and as a result, streamline the overall compliance and e-discovery workflows for all stakeholders involved.

A couple of key points to consider:

• Specialized capture of relevant detailed social media content.

Social media messages are composed of many different elements. Think of the many different ways to communicate on Facebook alone: you can post, like, follow, add comments, display a photo or graphics, RSVP to an event, share, direct message, and so on. There are also various related links, videos and embedded files that can become part of a social media record, and this interactive content gets updated in real-time. Shoe-horning all of these elements into an email-oriented retention structure restricts the ability to query and present each of the elements noted above using their unique values. As a result, you’re limited to searching archived social media data via email-centric fields (to, from, subject, date/time) or using clumsy keyword searches. Imagine the process of having to search for LinkedIn recommendations using the keyword “recommendation” in the body of email formatted text – the number of false-positive results could be overwhelming!

Preserving these attributes can dramatically improve the effectiveness of searches and compliance supervision by yielding fewer false-positives and providing valuable context for quick determination of relevance.

The benefits also extend to e-discovery by enabling the most comprehensive view of the messages being produced for the case in question.

• Reliable, advanced continuous archiving as conversations evolve.

Social media records multiply faster than email, and continue to change over time. Using Facebook as an example – a picture you post on your wall may be ‘liked’ by several friends, but days later, some of those friends comment on the picture. Weeks later, someone may share it. Each response changes the social media record, and you need to be able to review the original post (the start of the conversation) and each new related post to avoid missing critical elements.

If you ‘flatten’ social media content into an email format, how will you distinguish between the original Facebook post and the responses that followed? It will be difficult at best, because the record for each could be hidden in a generic, overwhelming block of email text. With each comment appended to the original conversation, you’ll have another email to review with a larger, even more expansive block of email text. What if only a portion of the conversation is relevant, and you don’t want to produce an entire multi-person conversation that spans months? The other extreme example: instead of seeing the entire conversation over and over again with incremental changes, you’ll wind up archiving individual pieces of one social media conversation, with no context. Think “virtual paper shredder” and you have to re-assemble the pieces.

Either way, you’ll spend too much time and energy poring over irrelevant emails and reconstructing conversations to make sense of them during compliance reviews and e-discovery. Ideally, the solution you implement should enable you to capture and review these types of conversations in one place, search by unique characteristics of individual content types, and review all related conversation elements as they looked when originally created: with valuable context preserved.

The Bottom Line:

More than ever, as the volume and diversity of social media and other digital communications content types expands, your ability to preserve, process and present all conversation-related content in its native form – versus “flattening” everything into an email-like format – will become increasingly important.

The quick fix appeal of an email-centric approach may be tempting. But there are critical and real potential costs to consider, like losing valuable message context that can be leveraged in many ways later on, and risking the invalidation of messages altogether because they were altered during the capture process.

Implementing an archiving solution designed with more than email in mind will save you and your organization valuable time, reduce risk, effort and resources required, while producing far more effective results.