Imagine a simple scenario. Jane Doe, a disgruntled employee at a multi-billion dollar mineral spring water company (A), sends out the following tweet from her work station and the marketing department’s Twitter account, which she is authorized to use.
“Senior Management here at (A) is telling industry analysts that Company (B)’s bottles are filled with tap water.
The statement is false. Five minutes later, Jane Doe deletes the tweet. No one in in Company (A) knows about the incident – yet. In the interim, however, her single tweet has been re-tweeted over 10,000 times, including to financial analysts on Wall Street, most major newspapers around the world, and the television media. The story is breaking.
Social Media Icons
An ambitious reporter calls Company (A) and asks whether the CEO will confirm or deny the veracity of the tweet. A board meeting is interrupted, the facts are presented, and neither the CEO nor the General Counsel has the first clue what’s going on. What tweet? Who sent it? From which account? Was it deleted? What did it say? Can we confirm the exact text from the retweets? Do we have an archive of the tweet? The General Counsel’s mind spins, but he is already is sure of one thing: there’s no archived record of the incident.
Does this sound unreasonable? It isn’t.
Social media has changed the face of business. Whether in product marketing, consumer branding, customer relations, and/or human resources, the benefits of corporate social media are beyond dispute. Yet mounting evidence shows that the risks are, too. Last week, Symantec released the results of an independent survey of 2,000 global enterprises across a variety of industries with a minimum of 1,000 employees. (Symantec confirmed that “[t]he respondents do not represent any kind of grouping of former or current Symantec customers.”) The survey results speak to the heterogeneous nature of the types of electronically stored information (“ESI”) stored during legal proceedings. See Evan Koblentz, Symantec: Files, Databases Overtake Email in E-Discovery, Law Technology News (Sept. 19, 2011). As part of the survey, respondents were asked the following question:
To Continue Reading: Click Here
--------------------------------------
Source: forbes.com
By: Ben Kerschberg
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment