Overview

For businesses, social media is a powerful way to connect. Services like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can deliver significant business value when connecting with clients, partners and colleagues. In the financial industry, the specific requirements of regulators like the SEC and FINRA can present a challenge — how can firms take advantage of social media while remaining compliant?

Compliant social media is the responsibility of every firm. Like other forms of electronic communication, social media is subject to SEC and FINRA compliance requirements. However, regulatory bodies have not issued new guidelines for each individual type of social media communication. Rather, social media fits into the framework of existing SEC and FINRA Rules. For example, FINRA Notice 10-06 (dated January 2010) advises that firms must ensure they have a solution in place to retain all records of social media communications as per SEC Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4 and NASD Rule 3110.

Social Media Archiving: for compliance and security. Secure, automatic social media archiving is the solution to meeting compliance requirements for all types of electronic messaging - including social media messages. Capturing a permanent record of every communication is essential to preventing data leaks and lost messages. It is also crucial to ensuring your firm's preparedness for audits, eDiscovery requests and legal proceedings.

Global Relay Archive for Social Media is purpose-designed for compliance - it securely captures, indexes and archives social media messages from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Global Relay Search provides the ability to search archived messages, allowing you to quickly and easily retrieve any past conversation. With Global Relay Archive, social media messages are integrated into a single unified archive of all your firm's messages, along with email, instant messages, BlackBerry, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and multiple other communication types. This simplifies your firm's compliance review process - Compliance, Legal and HR departments can use Global Relay's powerful suite of compliance review tools to perform monitoring and supervision across every message type, including social media.

Benefits

One vendor — Global Relay provides a single end-to-end solution for social media capture, indexing, archiving, supervision, audit and eDiscovery. Since Global Relay Archive supports social media seamlessly, the need to manage a third-party social media solution in addition to your existing archive is eliminated.

Comprehensive Data Capture — Once a social media account is set up for archiving with Global Relay, the user's activity is captured no matter what location or device they may be using. Unlike proxy/middleware solutions, Global Relay captures social media content generated on home PCs, mobile devices, etc.

Seamless setup — All Global Relay solutions are quick and easy to enable at your firm. Once the system is set up, users' experiences on social media are not affected.

Which Regulations Apply?

Registered financial firms are responsible for ensuring their social media activities are compliant with regulatory requirements, including:

• SEC 17a-3, SEC 17a-4, NASD 3110 — Requirements for electronic message recordkeeping
• SEC Rules 204-2, 206(4)-7 — Requirements for message recordkeeping & supervision
• NASD 3010 — Firms must establish and enforce written procedures for communications
• NASD 2310 — Financial recommendations made to a specific investor must be suitable for that investor
• NASD 2711(b)(3)(A), NYSE 472(b)(3) — Firms' legal & compliance departments must be copied on communications about research report contents
• FINRA Notices 10-06, 11-39 — Added guidance on blogs and social media web sites
• Additional rules and regulations may apply — Depending on the nature and purpose of the social media communication at hand

Global Relay Archive for LinkedIn

Global Relay brings compliance to the LinkedIn community.
Developed in partnership with LinkedIn, Global Relay Archive for LinkedIn is an in-house built solution that enables your firm to leverage the LinkedIn community while meeting the regulatory requirements for recordkeeping and supervision of electronic messaging found in the financial industry and other sectors. It is simple to setup and works automatically in the background to capture your firm's LinkedIn communications.

Once an employee's account is selected for monitoring, LinkedIn messaging is captured and archived no matter where employees are or what device they use to access LinkedIn (iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad, home PC, etc.).

Global Relay Archive for LinkedIn captures, indexes, and stores every type of messaging within LinkedIn including: Messages, Invitations, InMail, Profiles, Network Updates, Comments, and more.

Whenever there is new messaging content generated within a user's LinkedIn account, that content is downloaded and ingested into Global Relay Archive. The service preserves all original formatting, meaning that LinkedIn activity appears within the Archive exactly as it does on LinkedIn.com — including photos and links.

An additional unique feature is Global Relay's intuitive “redline” view. Whenever changes are made to a LinkedIn profile or page, Global Relay Archive automatically highlights whatever was added, removed or modified (as opposed to showing plain text without context). This provides Reviewers with instant insight into the LinkedIn activity at their firm, saving time and streamlining the process of social media supervision.

Global Relay Archive for Twitter

Global Relay provides compliance archiving for Twitter.
Global Relay Archive for Twitter allows firms to benefit from the powerful micro-blogging social network while addressing industry regulatory requirements for recordkeeping and supervision. Designed and built in-house, Global Relay Archive for Twitter is easy to deploy and works automatically to capture and index your employees' Twitter activity.

Once an employee's account is selected for monitoring, Twitter messaging is captured and archived no matter where employees are or what device they use to access Twitter (iPhone, BlackBerry, iPad, home PC, etc.). Global Relay Archive for Twitter runs in the background, leaving employees' user experience intact.

Global Relay Archive for Twitter captures, indexes, and stores all major forms of Twitter communication including: Public & Protected Tweets, Mentions, Direct Messages, and Profile Updates.

As new content is generated in a user's Twitter feed, it is captured and ingested into Global Relay Archive with along with its contextual metadata. The end result is a rich representation of the messaging data within the Archive for review and supervision.

Global Relay Archive captures changes to Twitter profiles with its intuitive “redline” view. Whenever changes are made to a Twitter profile, Global Relay Archive automatically highlights whatever was added, removed or modified (as opposed to showing plain text without context). This provides Reviewers with instant insight into the Twitter activity at their firm, saving time and streamlining the process of social media supervision.

Social Media Compliance Pre-Review

Added control via Global Relay Social Media Compliance Partners. Through trusted technology partners, Global Relay also offers additional capabilities for more precise control over your firm's social networking activity. These capabilities help support and enforce your firm's social media policies.

• Pre-review functionality - the ability to require firm principals, Compliance Officers or Legal departments to moderate specific types of social media content before it is visible to the public. With this feature, certain types of social media content is added to a queue for supervisor review before being posted on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook. This pre-review functionality is a FINRA compliance requirement for social media content that is deemed "advertisements" - such as public profiles and posts.
• Feature-specific Application Controls - features to block specific aspects of social media sites. If certain aspects of LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook (for example, Facebook Games) are not essential for your firm's business, they can be restricted.
• Employee-specific Access Controls - controls to customize social media access levels for specific users. With this feature, you decide how much access to grant each employee on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. For example, administrative staff might be granted only read-only access to social media sites, but registered representatives have the right to post content and status updates.

Add Social Media Marketing & Management — powered by HootSuite

Leverage Social Media For Your Business While Staying Compliant.

Global Relay has teamed up with HootSuite to offer a complete solution for social media marketing, management, pre-approval, archiving and compliance.

With Global Relay and HootSuite, your firm can use social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook and others for marketing, networking, recruitment and more — while remaining compliant with the requirements of FINRA, the SEC, FSA, IIROC, Sarbanes-Oxley, and others.

This partnership combines Global Relay Archive, the world’s best cloud-based archiving service with HootSuite, the leading social media dashboard.

Benefits of Global Relay Archive with HootSuite’s Social Media Dashboard:

Supported Networks

The HootSuite & Global Relay Archive integration supports LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and Google+

• Market via social media with HootSuite: The intuitive interface within HootSuite lets you leverage social media as a revenue-generating tool and easily engage in campaigns and conversations with your prospects, customers and partners.
• Leverage HootSuite Analytics: Use HootSuite’s analytics and tracking features to monitor all your firm’s social media properties, as well as to keep a finger on the pulse of your industry.
• Pre-Approve with HootSuite: Customize your workflows in HootSuite to support your firm’s internal review policies — for example, have a principal review all outbound social media communications before they are published.
• Archive with Global Relay: As you use HootSuite’s tools to engage in social media, messaging data is automatically captured and sent directly to Global Relay for secure, compliant archiving. Global Relay Archive is specifically engineered to meet the compliance archiving, monitoring, auditing, privacy and business continuity requirements for highly regulated industries.
• Supervise with Global Relay: Once your social media communications are in Global Relay Archive, use our extensive range of built-in tools for monitoring and compliance review.
• Learn with HootSuite: Wondering how to get started leveraging social media for your business? HootSuite offers a variety of social media education programs, including live training sessions and an extensive library of courseware.

How it Works

The HootSuite dashboard feeds data directly to Global Relay, ensuring that your firm’s outgoing social media communications are automatically archived in the cloud. This integration enables you to permanently capture publishing activity on a wide range of social channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare and Google+ Pages.

Joint customers using both HootSuite Enterprise and Global Relay Archive get easy access to review and supervise the data collected from their social media communications, including:

• Social Media Communications: the content contained within the message, tweet or post
• Social Profile Name: name of the social network profile that sent the message
• Social Profile Type: social network that the message was sent on
• Post User: email address of the employee that created the message
• Post Date: date that the message was originally posted

About HootSuite

HootSuite Enterprise is a social media management system that provides the most advanced security, measurement and team collaboration tools for business. Currently, HootSuite supports over 800,000 businesses and organizations, with 10% of the current client base in the finance industry.