The growth of social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn has aided many mortgage originators in their ability to communicate with their customers. But for the companies they work for, these tools could be a compliance nightmare.
Social media expert Randall Craig notes companies rarely think about risks when it comes to social media, let alone how to protect against them. At an organizational level, the responsibility for protecting corporate assets, including customer information, trade secrets and ultimately the brand, falls to information technology security professionals.
But, he continued, IT is inadequately equipped to do this job. Sometimes they are stretched too thin and don't have the necessary resources to stay ahead of security threats. Sometimes the threat lay beyond the reach of IT in the form of mobile phones.
“Sometimes the organizations themselves don't have a comprehensive social media policy, which means that individuals have their own ideas of what is acceptable and not,” Craig said.
Among his suggestions is to develop a social media policy to reduce risk. Going through the discussions and knowledge transfer that occur as the policy is being formulated is far more powerful than merely adopting a generic off-the-shelf policy.
There needs to be communication and training with employees, and the policy needs to be monitored, Craig said.
DigitalMailer, a Herndon, Va., provider of digital communication solutions to the financial services industry, has become a reseller of SocialSentry, a product of Roseville, Calif.-based SocialLogix Inc., which offers social media risk and compliance products. DigitalMailer will offer SocialSentry to credit unions as well as community and midsized banks.
SocialLogix chief executive Dan Romine said his product enables organizations to embrace social media in a productive way, while mitigating the risks inherent in social dialog.
The product tracks social media communication in real time, from any location the employee might be posting from, within the company network or Internet. Select users or the entire employee base can be monitored and all social media communications can be archived for future analysis or e-discovery.
Ron Daly, the president of DigitalMailer, noted there are a number of different risks involved when employees post on social media including is company reputation risk.
This system will watch for postings inside the network, both public and private, as well as the posting from employees made outside of the network, he explained.
Companies are moving towards complying with e-discovery in the next few years. In the mortgage business, there are concerns regarding data leakage and privacy issues, Daly explained.
People may believe putting information out in private (Facebook can be used to send messages and there are those who believe it will replace email in the future), but somehow it gets into public areas. This system will catch that and allow companies to correct the situation.
Daly said people believe a message sent in Facebook is secure or a message sent on LinkedIn is private, but those are really not private.
“It is helping the organization see what is going on outside of the walls of their organization,” he continued.
In addition, if certain terms are used in the mortgage industry or certain information provide, there are various federal and state disclosure requirements which come into effect. Failure to comply could lead to stiff penalties for the originator.
So the user can monitor what is being said by its own people, it can monitor what competitors are saying about them and it also picks up public information which is out there that comes from various sources, such as Google Alerts. The SocialSentry console organizes this and the person in charge of enterprise risk management can watch what is being said; it brings it all into one place, Daly explained.
During an interview at the 2011 Mortgage Bankers Association National Secondary Market Conference, an executive with Lenexa, Kans.-based LeaderOne Mortgage said his human resources department got nearly 200 Google Alerts each day as part of its social media monitoring efforts.
The company's big worry was not so much from current employees, but from former workers who have an ax to grind.
SocialSentry resides as a software-as-a-service program. The person who monitors the system has a dashboard and they have control. Daly said they could set up rules, alerts and accounts.
He has it for his own company and is currently monitoring 40 employees. If there are certain things that are said that he does not want them to say, either a word or a phrase, he can create a rule.
Each user gets to create its own list of hot topics.
If that word appears in an online conversation, the rule will create an alert on the system and an email back to the person who is monitoring it.
There are different levels of alerts that can be set up, including on varying amounts of risk.
The system is always on, he added.
In the mortgage industry, the situation with robo-signing provides a reason why companies need to monitor and even archive their online conversations.
Regulators are looking for email records; in the future the demands from regulators, attorneys, prosecutors and the like are just going to get even stronger, Daly pointed out.
This is where SocialSentry and systems like it step in. “We're talking about watching the conversations and documenting them—once something is caught by the system it is stored and archived in the system. So it is actually e-discovery compliance. If it catches it, it stays in there. So there is no way to go back and delete something that may have been sent that you didn't want to say,” he said.
The systems help to address the reality that social media use cannot be turned off by companies. Even if an entity has an internal policy of no social media use on the job, they cannot stop their own employees from using it on their own time, and talk about their company or communicate with their customers.
