Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/43390
SOCIAL MEDIA SNAPSHOT The pace and volume of social media's growth is sometimes hard to fathom. These statistics demonstrate the rapid rise in scale of some of the better-known social media destinations: • Facebook: More than 750 million users with 250 million active mobile users • Twitter: More than 190 million visitors per month, 95+ million tweets per day, and 20 billion total tweets • MySpace: More than 122 million active users per month • LinkedIn: More than 100 million members in over 200 countries, with executives from all Fortune 500 companies • YouTube: More than 2 billion videos viewed per day • Flickr: More than 5 billion images hosted • Wikipedia: Over 17 million articles hosted from 91,000 contributors more content to govern. Just capturing new types of interactions provides limited value. Where counsel can derive value is in mitigating risk and identifying insights in interactions that can help increase customer service or promote products. Given the sheer volume of potential interactions, and the fact that interactions might be very short (like a tweet) or much more complex (like audio), solutions must possess the ability to find relevant patterns and relationships in the information. Understanding what social media interactions mean is far more important than simply capturing whatever someone can create. WITH OPPORTUNITIES COME OBLIGATIONS Social media presents unique opportunities for even the most tightly regulated or highly litigated organizations. As social media evolves, it will only become more pervasive and create changing methods for interacting with employees, clients, counterparties and the public at large. At the same time, social media interactions present unique risk to organizations. As organizations develop their social media governance models, they should be mindful of the legal and regulatory environment that creates certain obligations, but also prohibits or limits some types of conduct. More important, they should look beyond the mere ability to capture social media interactions and, instead, focus on what it all means. ILTA 18 Corporate Law Departments ILTA White Paper