Autonomy's new Social Media Governance solution is designed to monitor and protect financial institutions and other enterprises in what is an increasingly wired world. The policy management and analytics application is being launched in response to new regulatory requirements for employees engaging with social media sites - for instance, the US-based Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Regulatory Notice 10-06, which requires member firms to supervise and archive content posted to social media for business purposes. The National Futures Association (NFA) in America is also developing rules associated with the use of social media and new stipulations can be expected on this side of the Atlantic too.

Social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and the like, represents an extremely important new channel for financial institutions to develop engaging and profitable relationships with their customers. However, it is not without its risks, and for a business to leverage social media legally and profitably, corporations need to establish a comprehensive strategy to govern social media interaction. For instance, a firm could face regulatory issues if a bank employee marketed or misrepresented the value of a potential investment on social networks. Likewise, if an employee defamed another fellow employee, or a client, on a social site, this could raise legal issues for the company.

The launch of Autonomy's new Social Media Governance software package is designed to negate these risks. It uses the vendor's existing meaning-based computing platform to recognise concepts, patterns, and relationships in unstructured information. This understanding, which is particularly important for the conversational form of communication on social networks, can be applied on financial firm's archiving, policy management, supervision, and analytics technologies to highlight potential problems.

Compliance officers or lawyers at banks or insurers can use the policy management and analytics software in Autonomy's Social Media Governance application to gain a real-time understanding of an institution's compliance status. The new product's dashboards combine data from all customer-facing channels, including email, audio, video, IM, web content, as well as social media like Facebook, giving firms a comprehensive overview of compliance risks across all channels.

According to the vendor the Autonomy Social Media Governance package has the ability to aggregate thousands of relevant news feeds, blogs, and social media sites, monitoring content from employees who have logged in via company networks, as well as identify discussion from users operating outside of company networks. It can also:

• Undertake a conceptual search of all aggregated content
• Undertake pre-programmed policy-based monitoring
• Ensure compliant archiving of regulated content
• Run advanced analytics such as clustering and visualisation tools
• Do escalation alerts and workflow management
• Reporting and trend analysis
• Executive dashboard presentations.

"Social media is now a vital way to communicate and engage with customers in a positive manner to grow your business," says George Tziahanas, vice president of compliance at Autonomy. "However, like every other customer-facing communication channel, regulated financial institutions need to govern social media interactions concerning the firm, its products and employee behaviour. We can provide the necessary conceptual understanding of social network conversations, and tie it into an organisation's existing compliance and governance infrastructure."

• One firm who could have used a social media compliance solution is ANZ Bank, which is currently investigating allegations that members of its debt collection department in Melbourne, Australia, set up a false Facebook profile so that they could befriend customers with bad credit and track them down.

The fake 'Max Bourke' described himself as a single man who liked poker and running on the beach but the false ANZ persona who had managed to collect 80 friends was subsequently unmasked by the Fairfax newspaper group in Australia. Paul Edwards, an ANZ Bank spokesperson apologised for the unauthorised intrusion, explaining that the several members of staff were now facing disciplinary action, and that the social media sting was a "rogue operation".

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