At the begining of 2010 Social Media is the latest business buzz word and company marketeers implore company executives not to be left behind. With the thought that Your company absolutely must get on the social media train this year before it leaves the station. Once the business streams are convienced it’s time to create the magic.

Social media empowers the individual user to manipulate or create new content, possibly drawing on your data, text, and images. In addition, each internal business line may have the desire to generate unique content that may then be manipulated and rebroadcast by customers. There’s little you can do once that content gets “out there” into the wild blue yonder of social networks, but it’s important for a set of standards to be established addressing the presentation of that content in a unified manner.
Once stylistic and presentation concerns are addressed, it is then on to the development of an internal content review and approval process. This is a critical and sensitive subject area. Most companies have a lot of trouble relinquishing control of their data and the content produced for consumer facing websites to individual business silos.

To balance out the need for true user generated content to thrive, alongside the standards of the technology department, a “Czar” of content should be assigned to review the proposed marketing and product offerings. This individual needs to be knowledgeable in both the needs and processes of IT, as well as those of marketing and communications. A single point of review will also assure that development standards are adhered to, the appropriate regulatory disclosures are in place, and the terms and conditions of the product are consistent with other channel offerings.

 Since an enterprise social site will presumably provide for customer feedback and comments, the reputation and image of your corporation may be put at risk as an unintended consequence of the technology. The upside of social media is that it provides a two-way channel that allows prospects and customers to come to you and interact in real time.

The downside risk is that it’s often anonymous and available to disgruntled customers, employees, and others who seek to tarnish your image or strike out against your company in a public venue. These sites have to be reviewed by scan programs as well as trained eyes to quickly remove inappropriate entries. Sometimes, when dealing with third parties, this task sounds easier than it is in practice. Prior to engaging with third party managed sites, review the terms and process for deleting offensive content.
The tricky part is delineating between legitimate complaints that should be addressed in a public forum and outright trolls that should be wiped clean. This is why if the job of culling comments falls on technologists, they will need to work hand-in-hand with customer service to tell the difference and generate a strategy.

As time goes on, the site must also be reviewed for consistency. Making sure that changes and new offerings don’t conflict or contradict the static portions of the site is important. Remember, “things change when things change.” If each department contributing to the website has ownership of their area and its content, then someone should look at the sum of these parts on a regular basis to make sure that the site has maintained its original integrity.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Just because social media technology is deemed to be something new and a break with conventional development paradigms, we have to apply the same standards as we do to the current applications when it comes to documentation, beta testing, and regression testing results.

Documentation of all new products, processes and methodologies for compliance with internal audit and regulatory agencies is imperative for enterprise social media deployment. We shouldn’t think that either the internal audit or regulatory agencies will view these applications any differently than others that came before. It wasn’t so long ago that we were trying to tell the audit community that rapid application development and client/server technology was different from that “old main frame world.” It didn’t work then and it won’t work now either.