The key differences for me, which I am currently incorporating into a chapter of a book: 

1. These systems are almost never under the control of the agency. Where they are, such as a tool like Socialtext Signals (enterprise Twitter, inside the firewall), this is a trivial thing and should be covered by a comprehensive policy. But where they are commercial services, there is no way for an agency to incorporate controls etc. 

2. It is impractical to simply deny access to these tools for their lack of those controls. I understand that that is not what Larry is arguing, but I think a number of agencies probably HAVE read the relevant citation and tried to block them off for those reasons. Two words: smart phones. Two more: employee owned. 

3. There is another dynamic that I will explore in an AIIM blog post next week and that is that these are public services. That is, whereas email is still private insofar as a message is sent from me to you, or to a list like this one, anyone without access to it doesn't have access to it. Unless you have taken specific steps to lock an account down, your Twitter account is available to read by anyone on the planet. Facebook is slightly better in some cases and with some privacy setting tweaking. But that is the default for these tools. And I know we've posted this to the list in the past, but it bears repeating. The Library of Congress has acquired the Twitter archive and at some point will make available every single Tweet ever sent with a very few exceptions: direct messages are not included, nor those from accounts set to private. And they won't be available in realtime, but rather after a 6-month delay. Still....

4. And many of them have the additional dynamic that the content is not created exclusively by the content creator. Everything from retweets in Twitter to Digg votes to Facebook "likes" and comments is generated by someone else who may or may not be part of the agency. This is particularly interesting in the case of Facebook photos - if someone tags you in a photo, that picture shows up in your Photos tab just as if you had uploaded it. And if they take it down, it disappears the same way. 

5. Finally, these services allow for aggregation in a way that hasn’t really been done before which presents a unique challenge, the subject of which is my AIIM blog post for THIS week. A Twitter acquaintance received an email from a client. He uses Outlook 2010 with the Outlook Social Media Connector - I use an Outlook plugin called Xobni that offers similar capabilities. When a message is received it pulls contact information, updates, etc. from whatever services are connected. In this case it pulled a rather unprofessional photo from the client's Facebook profile and displayed it in his inbox. 

So I certainly understand the concerns Larry raises. I also think it's appropriate to develop that guidance, and to do so in a way that recognizes the reality of how the services work, how people use (and abuse) them, and the realistic limitations of what can be done to control or manage them. And I don't think it's a Pandora's Box any more than instant messaging was, or email was, or computers were, or individual telephones were, or the printing press was, or written language was several thousand years ago. People need to be smart and they need to be trained. They need to understand the tools. But if we wait to issue guidance and do the heavy lifting until everything is certain and pinned down, we'll always be a generation or two behind. To me it's more a professional tempo thing - we have to get faster at figuring out the ramifications and determining appropriate guidance so that by the time, say, geolocation-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla, or facial recognition-enabled services, or whatever the next next thing is released, we're ready to tackle that as well. 

In the meantime, if anyone needs assistance with doing a social media assessment, writing a social media policy, determining social media retention processes etc. in the context of records management, well, you know how to reach me. ;)

Cheers, 

Jesse Wilkins, CRM
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(303) 574-0749 direct
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/jessewilkins

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