Often overlooked amongst the writers and strategists of social media are the air traffic controllers; your very own Chief Compliance Officers.
The role of a compliance officer is becoming more complex as Social Media dramatically increases the amount of messaging to be approved.
This is the equivalent of forcing the traffic of O’Hare International Airport through a small regional airport and asking the same air traffic controller to provide safety. Due to the amount of this dramatic increase in traffic, compliance officers need to be awakened to potentially non-compliant messages without sifting through the volumes of social messaging created daily. Using traditional means are simply not good enough to be able to keep up with this increase in traffic.
Compliance officers are highly educated and valuable members of your staff and we simply cannot afford to increase the size of compliance compartments. As I work with compliance officers, we work to modify workflows and make them more efficient and able to address these challenges.
With the speed of social media, we are unable to tell marketers to slow down in order that compliance keep up. Social Media simply will not slow down, so we work tirelessly to make tools better for both marketing and compliance to make speed and accuracy important.
As you meet with your traffic controller, here are a few steps to make things easier:
- Get a meeting between your departments. Be clear on the speed it takes to be effective in social media and honest about the challenge of approval.
- Plan out how messages should be filtered. Seek to understand how you will filter all social messaging, whether sales staff or administrative or the corporate Twitter account.
- Develop a sales strategy that includes compliance. Sales staff has input. Find out what they need and what makes them most effective.
- Automate, automate, automate. We spend a lot of time focusing on the toolsets and the key components that speed the process and allow for better compliant measures.
