Just as our personal relationships have evolved to exist online through likes, tweets, shares and group chats, so have our professional relationships. Chatting with your employees or using a poll to determine your next team building activity through might be the norm if your organization has adopted a collaborative social media network in the workplace, also referred to as an enterprise social media network.

Offering increased departmental transparency, more informed decision making, and faster response to critical issues, employees at all levels of the organization enjoy the benefits of these networks.

There is a range of collaborative networks on the market like Slack and Workplace by Facebook, but for companies accustomed to using Salesforce as their CRM, Salesforce Chatter is the natural go-to. With features like status updates, group discussions, and questions, Chatter is modelled after popular social media networks and is easy for the average social media user to begin using right away. Document and attachment sharing also makes for an easy way to move conversations off of corporate email and take meetings online.

“But now what?” is the question burning in the minds of IT Managers and Compliance Managers and even HR once Chatter gets going, because like with anything, the benefits come with the risks - namely the compliance and legal risks of free-flowing information through the network.

Let’s take a look at these what-if scenarios as examples.

• An employee in the marketing department requests the Twitter password from another employee, who copies over the password and sends it over in a private chat. This password now lives within the network, easily accessible by the skilled hacker.

• An employee receives a new social security number and sends over a document to HR containing this private information for them to update for payroll. This sensitive personal information now also lives in the network, with serious identity theft implications if accessed by the wrong person.

• Team members on the product management team accidentally post plans and timelines for the launch of new features on the company’s public group, instead of the intended private group. This confidential information has now been leaked to competitors.

• A few members on the development team repeatedly gang up on a member of their team within a private group based on their race. This form of cyber-bullying goes unnoticed to HR and the rest of the organization.

• An industry regulator requests copies of all communications in which price points have been discussed in internal conversations. The company must now turn around these records but does not have them stored in the requested formats.  The organization is now at risk for non-compliance fines.

The potential for information leakage, cyberbullying and non-compliance with record-keeping regulations is very high when using Chatter as an enterprise social media network. With chat conversations, posts and comments increasingly being investigated for eDiscovery, this can put your organization at risk for costly legal cases with damaging consequences.

Chatter activity can also result in non-compliance fines if records are not retained appropriately. Regulations in many industries demand the long-term preservation of digital communications in tamper-proof formats. One example is the financial services industry with regulators like the SEC, SEC, FINRA and FFIEC. Under FINRA 10-06 & 11-39, SEC 17a-3 and 17a-4 record-retention requirements, firms must ensure the capture of business-related communications regardless of the devices or networks used. To cover all your bases, this should automatically be taken to mean both external-facing social media as well as internal social media like Chatter.

The real issue with using Salesforce Chatter is that the platform itself is not built to store records in a way that meets these specific regulations i.e saving conversations in read-only formats. Thanks to Chatter’s app directory, archiving Salesforce Chatter can be quite simple with third-party Salesforce integrations. Many of these apps offer a simple solution that archives Chatter and routes it to a company’s journaling inbox.

Using Chatter archiving app can help you in more than one way.

• Easy, intuitive archiving
  Chatter to Enterprise Vault works with any email archiving or Enterprise Vault solution, allowing any you to manage your legal and compliance risks in any type of company.

• Peace of mind
  Real-time Chatter archiving ensures all chatter activity is captured in real-time. With an archiving application running in the background at all times, you'll never miss a moment and will always be prepared to turn around records of your activity for eDiscovery or compliance purposes.  
  
  
• Metadata collection
  The difference between creating archives and having screenshots of conversations is the fact that archives offer legal departments and regulators the complete picture of a record by having full metadata of the record gathered as well.
  
  Chatter to Enterprise Vault is capable of capturing edits, additions, and deletions to posts, bearing full information on when and where they were created, so you’re prepared with this information if ever needed to defend or make a legal case.
  
  
• Ability to monitor employee conversations
  Chatter archiving through a journaling inbox makes it possible to regularly monitor employee conversations for risky situations and take corrective action whenever needed.
  
  
• Flexibility to organize archives within your inbox
  An app like Chatter to Enterprise Vault helps by doing the hard work for you and storing data in a place familiar to you. How you organize these archives in your inbox is entirely up to you and saves you time having to learn a new system.

Salesforce Chatter can significantly help you improve employee engagement and productivity, but be sure to understand the risks before rolling it out, and have a strong archiving and monitoring in place to ensure your regulatory compliance and legal protection.