Facebook

Social Compliance

Posted by Anu Heda on Feb 21, 2011, in Thoughts , tagged with , ,
“You say tomato, I say tomato … Let’s call the whole thing off.”
– Ira & George Gershwin (from Shall We Dance)

I heard that song recently.  The chorus reminded me of the conversation we often hear between Compliance & e-Business regarding social media within investment management.

Compliance says, “set up process to archive, show us that it works and then begin with social media.”
e-Business says, “let’s start a little bit, dabble, and then begin a compliance process as we know more.”

Our perspective is to be compliant-at-all-costs.  In 2011, there’s little appetite for being out of compliance and the potential damage that can place on a brand.  So then what?

Well, archiving and organizing social media use is becoming easier.  We see tremendous value in an archiving pilot  that tries out both a leading providers (such as Social Ware or Actiance) and internal processes.  While each pilot at each firm will have different considerations, the pilot’s will include these steps:

  1. Identify a pilot group
  2. Provision their network accounts with access to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
  3. With Compliance, develop a prescriptive set of compliant posts
  4. Have the pilot group communicate the compliant posts
  5. Test the ability to prevent, delete, or retrieve posts

With numerous software-as-a-service solutions, perhaps this is a good place to give a little (to get a little) and begin with an archiving system pilot, before the first post on your facebook wall.

Why Naissance Isn’t on Facebook (For Now)

Posted by Mike McLaughlin on Sep 25, 2010, in Thoughts , tagged with , , ,

It’s somehow become generally accepted that every business needs a Facebook page.  So, in preparing for the Naissance launch, Googling for arguments why a company shouldn’t be on Facebook seemed like a fun exercise.

After 20 minutes I gave up.  I couldn’t find someone who says “here are 3 good reasons why your company doesn’t need to be on Facebook.”  And yet we arrived at that conclusion.  Here’s why:

  • We’re neither big nor retail. Coca Cola has hundreds of millions of customers, many of whom are actually on Facebook.  They need a page.  We’re a small company with a focused group of businesses as clients.  And from what I can tell, most of the people we meet with haven’t taken the Facebook plunge.
  • We know, already use, and prefer other tools. LinkedIn has become indispensible to us for business networking.  So we’re there (here and here).  Twitter is easy and has been fun for two years.  So we’re there, too.  But neither Anu nor I have found a reason to register for Facebook yet.
  • We need a better reason than “repetition”. We think a Facebook presence should bring something different to the table.  Something that people can’t get on a blog, a Web site, or via LinkedIn or Twitter.  Unfortunately, we don’t know what that should be for Naissance.  And judging by the pages of many companies, we’re not the only ones struggling for an answer.

We only have so many things to say.  And so contrary to the prevailing wisdom, we can live without a Facebook page for now.  We suspect many other companies can, too.