A Real Experience With Social Media Archiving

Towards the end of Q1, we plan to do some more research on “social business” and eDiscovery.  As I posted about previously, we are expanding our social media governance topic to include “social business.” Email has long been a primary target of eDiscovery because so much communication travels through email.  Increasingly, though, people use more types of “social” interactions that includes instant messaging (IM) and both internal (e.g. Jive) and external (e.g. FaceBook, Twitter) social media.  eDiscovery and information governance (IG) professionals need to be able to govern, collect, preserve, review, and produce all records of collaboration within an organization.

Governance of social media is clearly on the agenda right now – it is one of the more common projects that IG professionals cite when looking out on the horizon.

While it is on the agenda, actual experience with social media collection and preservation is still low.  That means it can be difficult for folks to put eDiscovery of social media into context – to see it and feel it.  There are, however, a few ways to get a better feel for the process.

I came across a live social media archive during a briefing with ArchiveSocial, a company that provides social media archiving software.  One of the company’s customers has its social media archive available to and searchable by the public:  the State of North Carolina.  Governments have to deal with Freedom of Information laws and therefore have more stringent requirements for archiving electronic communications.  So, it is something of a bonus that this archive is freely available to the public to test out.

There is no doubt that providers of social media collection and preservation and/or archiving – such as Actiance, Hanzo Archives, Reed Technology, and X1 Discovery among others – can provide a demonstration experience of how their tools work.  This example from ArchiveSocial caught my attention, though, because it is essentially a live customer deployment available for others to play around with.  Anyone interested in social media archiving should certainly check it out to get a feel for it, in addition to getting a demo from other vendors.

eDiscoveryJournal Contributor and eDJ Group Lead Analyst – Barry Murphy