The social media landscape today has ballooned to include several different types of platforms from video or photo sharing to microblogs to short posts and activity feeds for all. With all of this newly introduced communication software, there becomes an increasing amount of data and data risk.

There are three layers of information governance involved with social media use within official organizations. Read on to learn what these layers are and what can be implemented within your organization to keep data compliant with legal, organizational and regulatory policies and procedures, as well as keeping data safe and free of risk.

Social Media Security

Organizations, including small and midsize businesses, non-profits, corporate enterprises, even governments, are no doubt being inundated with automatic cyber-attacks, hacks, spam, phishing scams, DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks and other forms of electronic malware. Much of this malware also no doubt comes from social media use. Interestingly though, many organizations are not prepared or putting effort into scanning this content for malware stemming from social media use.

Short links distributed through tweets, wall posts and other forms of communication are generated by bots that are designed to appear human online, though they are not. The information gathered through deploying these bots can be devastating for an organization. Imagine that employee clicks on one of these links and critical business information becomes vulnerable to automated information harvesting.

This information can be used in a variety of ways including business or government espionage, theft of important customer or internal financial information, theft or distribution of important trade secrets like research or prototypes and illegal or compromising use of other critical data.

There are tools that can scan this content and monitor user behavior to ensure secure communications. One of the tools that can manage social media is HootSuite.

Social Information Archival

The archival of information is obviously important for any kind of enterprise or organization. Data can become stockpiled or deleted immediately on social media sites, depending on their own policies for data retention.

If an employee or member creates a piece of content that was deleted, there must be a way to retrieve when and why the content was removed. It may come up in a legal matter at some point (continue reading to see Social Media Information Policy).

Screenshots of content or documentation of social media activity are a couple of ways that this information may be monitored or recorded. Some kind of record needs to exist. A simple log may not suffice, depending on policy or regulations. Businesses with a supply chain, product or other third party scenario may need to refer to this information for business practices or other reasons effecting third parties or partners.

Social media insights can also be gained through tracking content and activity over long periods of time. Research into social use over time can enable organizations to become adaptable to market conditions, laws, disruptions, customer expectations, business practices and a broad range of other areas important to organizations using social tools and sites.

Social Media Information Policy

Organizations are more heavily burdened by legislation, regulation and threat of legal action or litigation than ever before. To complicate matters, the amount of information is growing ever more rapidly. As old data becomes archived, exponentially larger volumes of data are being produced. This trend is not going to slow down anytime soon. Just take a look at the massively growing market of cloud storage and computing services on the market. So how can we ensure that social media use follows guidelines?

It starts with auditing content, campaigns and procedures to ensure legal, regulatory and organizational compliance. Look at content to see if there are vulnerabilities. You don’t want users posting content that can lead to insider trading, for example. Trade secrets and confidential customer or supplier information must also not be distributed to the public, for another example.

These are just a couple of ways that this kind of media use can harm or injure the credibility, profitability and even viability of an entire enterprise. Information handling policies must be both set in stone for things that will not change (corporate responsibility, for example) and things that will change or evolve over time (product marketing, for example). Some things will in fact change quite rapidly, while others will be a little slower moving.

After the audit, the next step is to ensure enforcement. Not only management, but every single member of the organization must first understand that these policies are important and then see to it that they are being followed. Monitor all onsite or virtual network use and the use of social on those systems. Let users know that their activity is being monitored to dissuade them from engaging in the risky behavior to start with. Remember that the average employee spends nearly an hour engaging in social media use at work.

There are various risks associated with this activity. Employees must both know the risks associated but also understand that there will be no tolerance for non-compliance with these policies. Disciplinary action is at the discretion of each organization.

Implement the Layers Proactively

Remember that the sooner your organization starts implementing these layered tasks, the better. You don’t want to be comfortable today and sorry tomorrow for not realizing the mistake of complacency. Make sure that everyone is on-board at all levels to ensure the smoothest possible transition into security protocols, policies, procedures and use of tools and software.

People are often afraid of change or resistant to do things that require patience or more work on their end. You may be able to alleviate some of those pains from them, but ultimately everyone must be responsible for the information they produce, gather and distribute.

All this being said, social media is a great tool for boosting productivity as well as marketing efforts for most organizations, so don’t be afraid to use social media, just use these precaution measures first.

In part one of this post, I described metadata in SharePoint. In this part two, I will describe metadata management.

Managed metadata makes it easier for Term Store Administrators to maintain and adapt your metadata as business needs evolve. You can update a term set easily. And, new or updated terms automatically become available when you associate a Managed Metadata column with that term set. For example, if you merge multiple terms into one term, content that is tagged with these terms is automatically updated to reflect this change. You can specify multiple synonyms (or labels) for individual terms. If your site is multilingual, you can also specify multilingual labels for individual terms.

Managing metadata

Managing metadata effectively requires careful thought and planning. Think about the kind of information that you want to manage the content of lists and libraries, and think about the way that the information is used in the organization. You can create term sets of metadata terms for lots of different information.

For example, you might have a single content type for a document. Each document can have metadata that identifies many of the relevant facts about it, such as these examples:

• Document purpose - is it a sales proposal? An engineering specification? A Human Resources procedure?
• Document author, and names of people who changed it
• Date of creation, date of approval, date of most recent modification
• Department responsible for any budgetary implications of the document
• Audience

Activities that are involved with managing metadata:

• Planning and configuring
• Managing terms, term sets, and groups
• Specifying properties for metadata

Planning and configuring managed metadata

Your organization may want to do careful planning before you start to use managed metadata. The amount of planning that you must do depends on how formal your taxonomy is. It also depends on how much control that you want to impose on metadata.

If you want to let users help develop your taxonomy, then you can just have users add keywords to items, and then organize these into term sets as necessary.

If your organization wants to use managed term sets to implement formal taxonomies, then it is important to involve key stakeholders in planning and development. After the key stakeholders in the organization agree upon the required term sets, you can use the Term Store Management Tool to import or create your term sets. You can also use the tool to manage the term sets as users start to work with the metadata. If your web application is configured correctly, and you have the appropriate permissions, you can go to the Term Store Management Tool by following these steps:

1. Select Settings and then choose Site Settings.
2. Select Term store management under Site Administration.

Managing terms, term sets, and groups

The Term Store Management Tool provides a tree control that you can use to perform most tasks. Your user role for this tool determines the tasks that you can perform. To work in the Term Store Management Tool, you must be a Farm Administrator or a Term Store Administrator. Or, you can be a designated Group Manager or Contributor for term sets.

To take actions on an item in the hierarchy, follow these steps:

1. Point to the name of the Managed Metadata Service application, group, term set, or term that you want to change, and then click the arrow that appears.
2. Select the actions that you want from the menu.

For example, if you are a Term Store Administrator or a Group Manager you can create, import, or delete term sets in a group. Term set contributors can create new term sets.

Properties for terms and term sets

At each level of the hierarchy, you can configure specific properties for a group, term set, or term by using the properties pane in the Term Store Management Tool. For example, if you are configuring a term set, you can specify information such as Name, Description, Owner, Contact, and Stakeholders in pane available on the General tab. You can also specify whether you want a term set to be open or closed to new submissions from users. Or, you can choose the Intended Use tab, and specify whether the term set should be available for tagging or site navigation.

When social media volume is low, it is typically handled manually by one or more people in a company. These people are assigned to check Facebook and/or Twitter a couple of times a day and respond when appropriate.

As the volume of inquiries grows, it becomes expensive to respond manually to the posts and comments, and nearly impossible to do it on a timely basis. After a while, it becomes clear that automation is necessary to respond to the large number of social media comments in appropriate time frames.

During the next few years, organizations of all sizes will need to build a social media technology servicing framework to handle an increasing volume of inquiries, complaints, and comments. As social media is conceptually just another channel, it should be incorporated into the enterprise's overall servicing framework. However, the unique characteristics and demands of social media interactions require specialized solutions and processes, even though the responses should be consistent in all channels.

There are many applications to help organizations handle their social media servicing challenges, and new ones are constantly being introduced. However, currently, there is no single solution that addresses all necessary requirements. Enterprises that want a complete solution need to purchase several applications and integrate them. They should also merge these applications with their existing servicing infrastructure to ensure an excellent customer experience.

The underlying technical components required to build a social media servicing infrastructure are:

• Tools for monitoring social media sites for brand and company mentions.
• Data acquisition/capture tools to identify and gather relevant social media interactions for the company.
• Data extraction tools that separate "noise" from interactions that require immediate or timely responses.
• An engine for defining business rules that generates alerts, messages, pop-ups, alarms, and events.
• Integration tools to facilitate application-to-application communication, typically using open protocols such as Web services. Prebuilt integration tools, along with published application programming interfaces, should be provided for contact center applications.
• Storage to house and access large volumes of historical data, and an automated process to retain and purge both online and archived data. Additional capabilities may include the ability to access archived data via other media, such as a CD-ROM, and the ability to store and retrieve data in a corporate storage facility, such as a network-attached storage or storage area network.
• Database software for managing large volumes of information.
• Work flow tools to automate business processes by systematically passing information, documents, tasks, notifications, or alerts to another business process (or person) for additional or supplementary action, follow-up, or expertise.

The core administrative tools needed are:

• User administration capability with prebuilt tools to facilitate system access, user set-up, user identification and rights (privileges), password administration, and security.
• Alert management capability that allows thresholds to be set so that alarms, alerts, or notifications can be enabled when predefined levels or time frames are triggered when violations or achievements occur (examples include alerts to signal changes in topics, emerging issues, and sentiment).
• Metrics management, including the ability to enter, create, and define key performance indicators (KPIs) and associated metrics.
• System configuration with an integrated environment for managing application set-up, and parameters for contact routing, skill groups, business rules, etc.

The core servicing functionality includes:

• Skills-based routing tools to deliver identified interactions to agents or other employees with the proficiency to address them.
• The ability to queue and route transactions (calls, emails, chat/IM, and social media posts) to the appropriate agent, employee, or team.
• Text analytics software that uses a combination of statistical or linguistic modeling methods to extract information from unstructured textual data.
• Filtering tools that separate "noise" from social media customer interactions that require immediate or timely responses.
• Topic categorization software that identifies themes and trends within social media interactions.
• Root cause analysis, a problem-solving tool that enables users to strip away layers of symptoms to identify the underlying reasons for problems or issues.
• Search and retrieval abilities that allow large volumes of data to be searched, based on user-defined queries, to retrieve specific instances.
• Sentiment analysis capability that can identify positive or negative sentiment about a company, person, or product, and assign a numerical score based on linguistic and statistical analysis.
• A social CRM servicing solution that logs and tracks received social media interactions so that agents or employees can view the post/comment, create a customized response, and issue or post it.
• Response templates that comprise a library of customizable responses to common social media posts.
• A social media publishing tool that enables users to publish posts to social media sites.
• Reporting functionality in which reports can be set up based on collected data, metrics, or KPIs in a preferred presentation format (chart or graph); this should also include the ability to create custom reports based on ad hoc queries.
• Scorecards/dashboards for all constituents in an organization - agents, supervisors, managers, other departments, and executives.
• An analytics tool that conducts multidimensional analyses of social media data, used to look for trends and data relationships over time, identify emerging issues and root causes, etc.
• Recording software to capture social media inputs and responses.

Organizations also need a number of management applications to ensure that their social media teams or departments are properly trained and staffed. These tools are:

• Quality assurance functionality to measure the quality of social media comments and posts by agents, to ensure that they are adhering to the organization's guidelines.
• Coaching and e-learning software to deliver appropriate training courses and best practice clips to agents and other employees involved in responding to social media interactions.
• A workforce management solution to forecast the expected volume of social media interactions that will require agent/employee assistance, and to identify and create optimal schedules (this also tracks adherence to service levels for each inquiry type).
• Surveying software to determine if customers/comments were satisfied with the company's responses.
• Desktop analytics to provide an automated and systematic approach to monitor, capture, structure, analyze, report, and react to all agent/employee desktop activity and process workflows.
• An analytics-oriented performance management module that creates scorecards and dashboards to help contact center and other managers measure performance against preset goals.

Social media is going to change the servicing landscape for many organizations within the next five to eight years. This is because the volume of social media comments and posts is expected to grow rapidly, comprising 50 percent of all service interactions. Companies that build a servicing strategy incorporating social media will have a major advantage over their competitors.

Companies do not need all of the solutions identified above, they need to select the ones that allow them to incorporate social media into their servicing strategy and infrastructure so that customers can interact with them in their preferred channel.