Posted byPaul Quigley on August 28, 2009

Once upon a time it was all so simple. Wasn’t it? Content was just, well, content. The guts of documents, files, records, stuff which had content and was worth keeping.

Now, it’s all changed. Not only has the whole ‘content is king’ thing changed beyond all recognition since the digitalisation of networks and the digitisation of content, but now we are all faced with the mind-bending prospect that social networking and rich media are also part of the great panoply and must be catered for, cared for, nurtured and, well, managed.

Many Luddites have long balked at the prospect of storing corporate emails longer than a few months, but since the compliance bandwagon rolled into town, countless digital storage facilities and off-site backups of petabytes of data are now routinely captured and archived almost in perpetuity to satisfy the rather nebulous notions of risk assessments and so forth. And thus within that entire capture, retain, store and retrieve cycle, the guts of social media and social networking is becoming increasingly an adjunct of information that is becoming part of this transmogrification of content, coming in from the periphery into the media macula, in sharp focus and very much expected to become part of the fabric of content management and knowledge management.

Of course, the scale of such an undertaking is far from being a no-brainer in terms of what to focus on, how to go about handling social media, social data, social content, in such a way that satisfies both the regulator’s appetite for mega-compliance and the business appetite for profit at a reasonable cost. Balancing these simultaneous equations is going to be no mean feat, given that it’s all new to everyone and there’s certainly no a-la-carte ‘how-to’ menu on what it all means that’s readily available.

So how are you going to make sure your business continues to ride the wave and not sink?