There is a TON of interest in archiving Social Media for compliance. I’ve run into a few posts recently about government concerns at DigitalCommunities.com here and here. Here’s some of the poignant quotes:
As more agency employees use Twitter, Facebook and similar external sites, some state and local IT officials are asking if those communications should be archived for public viewing. The problem is that agencies don’t know how to archive communications made on third-party social networks.
[Melinda] Catapano follows legal trends closely and thinks a mandate from the courts could be imminent. “There are so many ways a court could say this is connected to official agency work, ergo you better be able to produce that record,” she said.
As citizens become accustomed to accessing more types of communication archives, social network archives will be a logical expectation, said Elayne Starkey, chief security officer of Delaware and FOIA coordinator for the state’s Department of Technology and Information.
Catapano admitted that she, like many other CIOs, didn’t have a clue as to how to archive external social networking posts.
How To Archive Twitter
In the wake of interest like this from government agencies, I’d like to show you how easy it is to archive Twitter with Iterasi’s web-based archiving tools. It’s a simple three step process:
- Copy your Twitter RSS feed (it’s on your twitter page, e.g., http://twitter.com/iterasi)
- Paste it into Iterasi’s Custom Feed module
- Click “Save”
Iterasi will immediately begin archiving your tweets and will continue to do so automatically until you turn it off.
An Added Bonus: Links Get Archived Too
Twitter is extremely useful for sharing information to many people conversationally. For that reason it’s very common to share links to blog posts, news articles, websites, etc. through Twitter.
Knowing this, we built into our Twitter archiving the ability to archive any link you include in a tweet. For instance, you this tweet from the White House Twitter account would archive the tweet as well as the link it points to (in this case the “Educate To Innovate” blog post).
Iterasi makes archiving Twitter and other social media extremely simple. If you have any questions please contact us.
