FINRA – Jeff Marmins

There is demand for software solutions and practices that mitigate the risk of employee use of social media. C7group and enterprise software solution provider Sociallogix are hosting an executive roundtable on Social Media Risk Management.

This is a critical discussion for corporate and legal leadership about mitigating the risks associated with loss of intellectual property, compliance violations and HR lawsuits through employee use of public social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Social Media Risk Management Roundtable [PDF]

Legal, Compliance, Human Resource and IT leadership must come together to discuss the role and effectiveness of governance and technology and how risk can be reduced and behavior monitored in actionable ways.

WHEN: December 1, 2011, 8:00 AM

WHERE: Drexel University Center for Graduate Studies, Sacramento, CA

The roundtable will include a discussion moderated by Jackie Alcalde-Marr. Jackie is the author of Social Media at Work and the Director, North America, Organization & Talent Development for Oracle. She is also adjunct faculty at Drexel University and the University of San Francisco.

Risk in this area will grow as corporations become more and more engaged in the modern social business imperative. The discussion will include recommended approaches to rules and regulations recently introduced by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), SEC, NASD and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

We look forward to your participation!

Sponsorship for the Social Media Risk Management Roundtable is available. This is a unique offer to position your brand now in a critical practice area that is just beginning. Please download the sponsor offer and contact information. Exploring solutions now, in this format, will create the practice leadership in this space.

As the world becomes more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent and the population continues to embrace social computing, today’s enterprises face the dawn of a new era – the era of the Social Business. Just as the Internet changed the marketplace forever, the integration of social computing into enterprise design represents another enormous shift in the landscape. Organizations that successfully transform into a Social Business can potentially reap great benefits – among them the ability to deepen customer relationships, drive operational efficiencies and optimize the workforce.

According to a recent Gartner prediction report: “By 2014, 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices. Support for corporate applications on employee-owned smartphones is impacting an increasing number of organizations and will become commonplace in four years. The main driver for adoption of mobile devices will be employees who prefer to use private consumer smartphones or notebooks for business, rather than using old-style limited enterprise devices. Enterprises will no longer be able to standardize on one or a few corporate mobile device platforms, but instead will have to support a variety of mobile platforms for which they will have to choose an approach that enables selected corporate applications while enforcing IT policies through management tools and capabilities. Organizations that do not support personal devices and fail to set and enforce policies will experience an increased number of security exposures and incidents.”

These tools are asking our workers to change the way in which they work, and the transparency with which they do that work. It is shifting business and leadership culture in ways enterprises have not seen in the past. It’s new. It’s scary. And it’s hard. And the part that’s hard is NOT the technology. The part that’s hard is the culture, the behaviors, the new skills we want workers to have innately.

Businesses are feeling the impact from employee social networking communication. Newly emerging issues surrounding social network communication, such as loss of intellectual property, compliance violations, and HR lawsuits, as well as productivity of the workforce all threaten the health of the business causing loss of revenue, reputation and potentially, customers. Corporations today are spending billions of dollars to mitigate such risks from email, instant messaging and other established methods of communication.

In a recent market research social networking related exposure incidents for US companies have increased to seventeen percent in 2009 from twelve percent in 2008, and is expected to continue to grow. In a separate market research, twenty four percent of the companies indicated that they have disciplined an employee for his or her activities on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Guidelines and policy alone are not sufficient in eliminating the risks.

With proper planning it may be possible to take advantage of the new media’s strengths and mitigate the risks that your company will end up in the headlines.