Brolly is an Australian social media records management platform that was built with Australian recordkeeping requirements in mind. It connects with the most popular social media networking sites in Australia; Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram. Brolly automatically captures a snapshot of all social media interactions including posts, conversations, threads, comments, likes, shares and metadata such as the time of the post and edits, to provide a complete and compliant social media record. The platform has a whole host of strict security measures in place to give you control of retention and removal, and to protect your records.

Despite social media’s longstanding history, which stretches back to 1997, it’s an area of records management that is only recently getting attention, perhaps due to its undeniable popularity and adoption by many organisations as a means for communicating with customers. A recent survey showed that 60% of Australians use social media 1-5+ times a day, and 52% of businesses are using social media to communicate with their customers.

Here are three Australian Brolly case studies that show it’s the platform your organisation needs for compliant social media records capture.

Making Emergency Services Recordkeeping More Efficient

Emergency services that utilise social media are a prime example of why the federal government emphasizes recordkeeping in this field.

Many local government agencies, such as Livingstone Shire Council, have found that social media platforms provide an inexpensive way to stay in contact with residents and visitors. With population centres on the coastline and a sparsely populated rural interior, Livingstone has found social media to be a convenient way to provide critical updates to people in the area.

Emergency communications are a priority for Livingstone Shire Council, given the area’s history of natural disasters. In such situations, social media provides an ideal platform for the government to initiate two-way communication with residents in real time.

Naturally, the federal government has an interest in keeping record of these interactions to fulfill their records management obligations, however keeping records can also help experts assess the efficiency of communications during an emergency. This data can help drive more informed decisions about how to communicate more effectively in the future and provide a medium for feedback from residents.

The Livingstone Shire Council enlisted Brolly to manage and keep track of their social media records. Trish Weir, Manager of Customer Engagement, echoes the worries of many that Facebook, for instance, may fail to serve as a reliable recordkeeping platform by itself.  She says, “We have no control over what Facebook does with our page, or our messages,” says Trish. “They could close our page down for some reason and we’d lose everything.”

Keeping Track of Day-to-Day Communications in Albany

The City of Albany has also found that social media provides a great avenue to communicate with ratepayers and visitors. Since these social interactions take place on numerous, separate accounts, away from the city’s own social media pages, the agency required a tool to manage records across various platforms.

Communication manager Nathan Watson said, “we understand the importance of our social media conversations and how they fit into the larger context of our organisation. Anything that we generate within the community and any content we publish in the public realm is a record. It can be challenging because it is such a public space, we have to monitor pages that are owned by other people, as the public will jump on there and air their grievances about a road closure. It’s important that we can be part of these conversations and when we do need to get involved, it’s generally a better experience for the community. It’s important that we can be part of these conversations and when we do need to get involved, it’s generally a better experience for the community.”

At first, they tried an inefficient system of taking ad-hoc screenshots when there was a post that received a lot of attention or received negative feedback, however this quickly proved unworkable, non-compliant and extremely time consuming.

To help stay within the mandates of the legislated recordkeeping, the City of Albany engaged Brolly to capture and record these important interactions. Watson says that Brolly’s platform gives his office and the town government “peace of mind”, making it easy for the city to access any record at any time.

Building TasWater: A New Brand Image and Better Data

TasWater, a public utility company servicing Tasmania, has future-proofed its new social media engagement strategy with archiving tool, Brolly.

Previously active mostly on Twitter, and even then in a limited capacity, TasWater’s social media presence consisted primarily of announcements from the utility and complaints from the public. This overwhelmingly negative slate of interactions coloured public perception of TasWater.

The company also used LinkedIn for employee recruitment purposes.

Brolly helped TasWater not only manage recordkeeping, the platform also helped TasWater refurbish their brand image by emphasising releases of positive updates, such as service upgrades and newly completed infrastructure. Using Twitter to announce positive news helped to balance the negative communications, from necessary announcements of occasional outages to public complaints.

“Just the sheer amount of data that Brolly could capture in minimal time was very appealing to us and it ticked all the boxes of records compliance. Brolly’s integration to our social media systems was seamless. We can’t see it working. It’s just something that just operates in the background storing our records in full compliance with 100% of national and state laws,” states Jonathan Mallison, TasWater’s Digital Communications Director.

Brolly has also enabled TasWater to collect higher quality data to empower internal decision making.  “Brolly will enable us to gauge how much engagement we generate throughout the campaign so we can justify the project’s success to management,” described Jonathan.  “Brolly captures all of our social media, including the edits and deletions.  When people edit messages, we get an original post and a copy of the edits, and when people delete a post we get a copy of that original post as well”.

Reach out Today

At Miktysh, our team of business consultants specialise in information and records management strategy. If you’d like professional advice for developing your organisation’s social media records management policy, or would like a demonstration or free 30-day Brolly trial, please contact us.

Blog Post: The Challenges of Social Media Recordkeeping