While scandals and legal cases centering on email, social media and text messages make headlines nearly every day, most companies are unprepared to deal with a situation where communications data is missing or hard to find, has been tampered with, or presents unfavorable evidence. Even today’s smartest organizations find themselves playing the game of catch-up.

In a recent Compliance Week piece by Tim Sprinkle, Mike Pagani from Smarsh highlighted how the challenge for compliance officers, specifically in the financial services industry, is getting their arms around all of the messages that come from their companies across different social and digital platforms.

Mike noted, “If your existing compliance perimeter focuses only on e-mail and you’re automating that, people these days are smart. They know that e-mail is being supervised, so they’re not going to communicate about anything that’s risky in there. So we’re seeing a lot more instant messages. A lot more mobile text messaging. I like to say: When you look at the whole spectrum of communications options that are available today, there are a lot of blind spots in a lot of organizations.”

Tools including social media, instant messaging and text messaging, are necessary to stay competitive and relevant. However, they bring with them risks and challenges. Automating the process of checking all social media communications against established policies for approved use, especially when personal accounts and networks are in play, is critical to mitigating risks while empowering the right balance of speed, agility, and reach.

Smarsh believes that supervising communications with solutions that enable real-time monitoring and automated policy checking is the right approach to balance governance with business and communications agility. When archiving content, companies should select a platform that can handle all relevant content types, not just email or social media. It’s also important to capture social media feeds in their native formats, so content can be reviewed in its proper context (you can see if content originated from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.).

Join the many thousands of Smarsh customers in regulated industries that benefit from a unified, search-ready archive for email, instant messaging, text, web, video and social media communications. For more information please visit http://www.smarsh.com/archiving-and-compliance/.