Over the last 6 months we've seen several large enterprises make commitments to incorporate social media into their governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices. As a result, digital teams are coming to us with mandates and deadlines to inventory, review and remediate their enterprise's global web and social footprint. This appears to be a harbinger of a sea change in how the C-suite addresses the risks and rewards of social media – in other words, social media governance.

When used properly, web and social media sites are powerful marketing tools which can bring customers to your door; however, they can also bring the regulators knocking. The FFIEC has finalized its guidance on the use of social media by financial institutions and the CFPB has started the door-knocking. Factor in the use of social media by mortgage loan originators (MLOs), which you are also required to monitor, and the compliance challenge is escalated. Now state regulators (for example WA, TX, CA and AZ) are getting more aggressive in overseeing the use of social media and are sending out "intent to audit" letters. Are you prepared to meet the challenge of an audit?

Last week I began a series on Social Media Governance with the first post titled 3 Keys to Managing Your Social Footprint. In that post I stressed the distinction between social presence governance and social content governance. For a decade people have focused their governance concerns on what can and cannot be said within the content stream of social networks, placing guidelines in a corporate social media policy. This is social content governance.

HIPAA - those are five letters that keep healthcare compliance and risk officers awake at night.

As we've explored before, a business of any size is going to be challenged to stay on top of its social footprint. When we've run social presence audits for hospital networks, we usually find a multitude of social media "points of presence" including those for the corporate brand, individual hospitals, specialty centers, departments, programs, campaigns, doctors, nurses and even the gift shop!

Quickly! Think about how you manage your social media.

I bet what came to mind was some collection of content publishing, listening, or analysis systems. If you're in a regulated industry then perhaps a content compliance or archiving system might have come to mind.

What's the common denominator? Content. That's not a bad thing since sharing content is why we're on social media. However, we're overlooking a fundamental component – Presence!