eDiscovery in Social Media: “if it exists, it is discoverable”

Sept. 4, 2013 - PRLog -- For organizations, social media channels such as blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter bring both business opportunities and risks. ZyLAB, leading provider of eDiscovery and information risk management solutions, today publishes a new whitepaper that illustrates how  organizations can  deal with the issue of managing, preserving and - if needed- producing social media data.

ZyLAB’s white paper “eDiscovery in Social Media: if it exists, it is discoverable (http://www.zylab.com/resources/white-papers/social-media-in-the-workplace.aspx)” presents an overview of the current situation and provides insight in how clear internal policies and software to support the preservation and production of business’s social data can help organizations to manage social media in a business environment.

Today the majority of organizations use social media to increase brand awareness and to communicate with the millions of users of these sites. It is estimated that overall roughly 75% of the workers in the U.S. and Europe access social media at least once a day from their PC or (personal) mobile devices when they are at work.

Johannes Scholtes, Chief Strategy Officer of ZyLAB: “It is clear that social media are here to stay. But as social networking becomes as central to workplace conversation as the water cooler, enterprises still struggle to keep up with the evolving technology and the necessary policies for it. Employers find it hard to balance the conflicting interests of employee’s privacy and corporate security. The combination of business sensitive information and a mass broadcast capacity keeps legal departments awake at night. IT struggles with the fact that social media sites are operated outside of a business’s firewall and are not in their direct control.”

Although at this moment there are no specific laws and regulations for the governance of social media regulatory frameworks for social media are beginning to emerge from the FTC, the NLRB, FINRA, the SEC and other agencies. Both legal and IT professionals should be aware that communication in social media will be considered as "electronically stored information" (ESI) which means eDiscovery rules apply in case of litigation.

The white paper “eDiscovery in Social Media: if it exists, it is discoverable (http://www.zylab.com/resources/white-papers/social-media-...)” can be downloaded from the website of ZyLAB.