Small Businesses Struggle with Preserving Social Media Content

As small businesses aggressively employ Facebook, Twitter and blog posts as marketing strategies, gone are the days when a corporate communiques were tightly controlled by a few managers in a communications department.

But many businesses are finding an undesirable side effect — an inability to keep record of all the ephemeral ideas and thoughts they‘re sending into the ether via social media.  However, some new technologies are offering solutions to help businesses manage their social media presence by archiving all communications.

Paul Gunning, chief executive and president at Tribal DDB Worldwide, says, “What if three years from now somebody comes and says, ‘I need every Facebook post, every tweet’?”  Tribal DDB is in the early phase of presenting clients with new technologies to help manage social media by scanning the Web and archiving your business’s communications.

Tribal DDB is partnering with Nextpoint, a company which capitalizes on cloud-based tools to archive Internet content, to introduce a product called Cloud Preservation to its customers.

“Because of the explosion of content generated by the Internet, you need to have an Internet solution for it,” states Rakesh Madhava, chief executive of Nextpoint.

The product, which debuted in August, uses Amazon Web services to scan the Internet and archive webpages, blogs and social media posts that can then be saved, searched, tagged and exported.  The cost of the service is $15 per month for the basic service package.

For small businesses that work with compliance issues, this technology could prove to be critical in hedging off unforeseen future issues.

“How do you document social media?  How do you document advertising?  Any client communications are supposed to be documented,” says Casey Smith, the president of a small wealth management firm.  “How do you do that, if you have to keep post after post after post?”

Smith uses Cloud Preservation to follow and monitor all of his company’s social media posts and receives a weekly email of the backup.  He says he likes the service so much that he wishes they would offer a daily archive.

Geoffrey Vance, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery and head of the firm’s digital data management, privacy and discovery group, asserts, “Someone may get sued for the content of their social media or the information in the social media may be relevant to the suit.  If you haven’t preserved it, you’ve lost it.”