The Hanzo Blog

30 Apr 10

Retaining Control of Social Media

In the near future, a single dedicated website will seem as old fashioned as newspaper and television ads. The cloud and the social web are forcing all our data off our own machines and onto those of bigger companies. Sometimes it’s just because it’s less hassle - who wants to be operating a data center anyway - and at other times because we want to take advantage of the ability of social media to engage with our customers. We want to hear what they have to say, get instant feedback on our products and services.

Of course this causes all sorts of problems: when everything was on your own machines you might just have been able to keep track of it. Use backups to see what you did in the past, and keep carefully constructed processes to see what you published and keep appropriate records. Now you are publishing to Facebook and Twitter, commenting on blogs, and who knows what else, and that makes keeping records, backups and so on an impossibility.

This is where web archiving can let you regain control. By monitoring and archiving every little thing you put out onto the web and by archiving the links between all of these things (and your customers) you can build a comprehensive one-stop collection of everything you do. You can trackback over time to see what you said and when. If you have compliance obligations or legal issues you can “dial back” and see exactly what was communicated when and how. Your marketing team can see how they presented things at any given time and use it as inspiration or to help them stay fresh. You can keep and search records of everything your customers say about you on social media sites. In short - returning ownership of vital corporate information to you and not leaving it in the hands of third parties like Google and Facebook and Twitter.