Talk to a few Boston start-ups and it’ll be fairly obvious that we’re each brewing up some interesting ideas with really smart people. Because each problem we’re solving is so unique, each of us has a very different company culture.

Backupify is in the position to build a once-in-a-generation company and industry and we’re very excited to bring that to fruition.

Find out why we’re a group full of curious people, what our core mission is and what our passions are:

Here are five things not shown in the video that also encompasses all that is Backupify:

1. We’re in the knowledge age and don’t believe in working a 9-5 and tracking our hours. We’re given flexible hours and unlimited vacation time with the belief that we’ve hired very smart, ambitious people that are focused on completing projects, not on the total number of hours worked per week.

2. No one here has an office. As you saw in the video, our space is completely open. No one – not even our CEO, Rob May, or any executive – has an office. We’re all intermingled and many frequently change where they want their desk to be.

3. We’ve created friendships with many of our co-workers. We all have the same goals in mind and work very closely together to get things done. So not only do we get to come into work to build something completely new, but we get to do it with some of our friends which is pretty unique.

4. Working hard and smart is our #1 priority, but throughout the day we like to interject some company-wide music and games. We play some music throughout the day to keep us upbeat and also have an intense company ping pong tournament going on that provides some good lunch-time entertainment. Occasionally a toy helicopter or hover craft will zoom by our desks – no big deal.

5. We have monthly company-wide meetings. Just a year ago there were only about nine of us here so the meetings were quite small. Now, we’re up to 24 of us and growing. These meetings are used to go over anything from notable benchmark achievements to inspirational talks by Rob – followed by team bonding at a restaurant afterwards.

Oh! And did I mention we are hiring? Head on over to our page on the Workvibe site to see what positions we’re looking to fill. Don’t see the position you’re looking for? Contact us anyways – we always like to hear from smart, ambitious people who are excited about what we’re doing!

1. Adria Richards
Adria Richards is a tech consultant specializing in workflow efficiency. She is also a very familiar face at blogging and technology conferences across the country and has inspired thousands by helping them embrace their inner geek.

We follow Adria to get the latest in the world of Cloud Apps, Social Media, Google Apps and SaaS. Adria never fails to update us on the important talks and conferences going on in the tech world and even provides her expert opinion on topics affecting businesses and consumers alike.

Twitter handle: @adriarichards
Recent tweet: “Just got email invite to test drive Real Time Google Analytics! http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/09/whats-happening-on-your-site-right-now.html”

2. Susan Cline

Susan Cline (aka Google Apps Expert) specializes in developing and delivering adoption solutions for organizations moving to Google Apps. Susan has also authored a series of Google Apps courses on the subjects of Google Docs, Google Mail and Google Calendar.

We follow Susan to get deep insights into anything and everything related to Google Apps. Susan’s our go-to resource for bridging the gap between understanding what Google Apps is and actually using it to its full potential.

Twitter handle: @GoogleAppsSusan
Recent tweet: “10 reasons to trust Google in business http://t.co/8K34xNdT. We’ve got a lively discussion going on in the comment section #googleapps”

3. Steven Peltzman

Steve Peltzman is the Chief Technology Business Officer at Forrester Research. He made his bones as the CIO at The Museum of Modern Art during MoMA’s landmark $858 million building project (which included a great deal of technology infrastructure).

We follow Steve to understand the scope of IT and technology integration in businesses today, all from a successful CTOs perspective, along with the words of wisdom that Steve often dishes out during the day.

Twitter handle: @stevenpeltzman
Recent tweet: “Understand that #cloud risk is not a single entity but one in a long, long chain. What’s the total risk chain of NOT going cloud?”

4. Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a business analyst that specializes in the cloud — specifically how online apps can increase business agility. When he’s not writing about cloud-based organizations, he’s directly advising or participating in them.

We follow Ben to get his expert views on enterprise software, software integration, platforms and infrastructure but most importantly, we admire Ben for his exceptional ability to articulate technology simply for everyday users.

Twitter handle: @benkepes
Recent Tweet: “For the one person on the planet who doesn’t agree that Steve Jobs was prescient, watch this http://youtu.be/Or7zaUaP-J8 #Cloud #Amazing”

5. David Linthicum

David Linthicum is the CTO of Blue Mountain Labs, but he still finds time to regularly write about developing trends in cloud computing, SOA and data integration.

We actively follow David to get the latest in the world of technology as it happens. Expect David to fill you up with news and reviews on topics ranging from data analytics, business intelligence to cloud-based applications and integration.

Twitter handle: @DavidLinthicum
Recent Tweet: “Beware Best Practices, they can kill productivity, innovation and growth – Adopt Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter http://lnkd.in/QwfE-H”

6. Krishnan Subramanian

“Krish” is an ex-physicist turned tech evangelist who dabbles in a dozen subjects and pursuits at once. The Next Web named Krish as one of the Top 25 Influential Voices tweeting about Cloud Computing.

We follow Krish for a sneak peak on high impact topics in the fields of Open Source, Cloud Computing and the interface between them. Krish also occasionally treats us with his tweets on progressive political ideas.

Twitter handle: @krishnan
Recent tweet: “Gmail’s new theme should let me set the “Comfortable, cozy or compact” setting for each device/browser instead of account. #besmart”

7. Matt Rosoff

Matt Rosoff was the the founding editor at CNET from 1995 to 2000. Today he’s Silicon Alley Insider’s West Coast Editor. In between he was an analyst for Directions on Microsoft for 10 years. We wish we had his resume.

We trust Matt to keep us updated on the latest in the world of tech and the developments in the valley. But what’s most entertaining is the wittiness Matt adds to his tweets, that make them a must-read.

Twitter handle: @MattRosoff
Recent Tweet: “Look At How Google Is Backing Away From The Idea Of Google+ As A Social Network $GOOG http://read.bi/t3i6Ny”

8. Loraine Lawson

Loraine is a tech journalist with bylines that span IT Business Edge and TechRepublic, with content aimed squarely at CIOs and high-level IT managers.

Loraine tweets regularly on key issues of data and process integration, such as SOA (Service-oriented architecture). Follow Loraine to get quality information and views in the data integration sphere.

Twitter Handle: @LoraineLawson
Recent Tweet: “So, no opinions on integration and internal clouds? Is internal #cloud an oxymoron? I feel like it is.”

9. Om Malik

Om Malik needs no introduction but for those (few) who don’t know him;
OM is a venture partner at True Ventures and founder of the leading tech blog, GigaOM, which was named among the top 100 most influential blogs on the Web, by CNET. Om has closely watched the Internet revolution and is one of the most well-connected people in the valley.

We follow OM for his great insights on VCs, hot startups in the tech industry, future of social networks and basically everything you would want to know about the Silicon Valley.

Twitter handle: @om
Recent Tweet: “my counter argument to Mark Z that without Silicon Valley there wasn’t gonna be Facebook. Read before commenting. http://gigaom.com/2011/11/03/sorry-mark-facebook-needed-silicon-valley/”

10. Kevin L. Jackson

Kevin L. Jackson is the founder of the Cloud Musings blog, which covers the rather niche (but giant) topic of cloud adoption by government agencies. Kevin’s street cred comes from his post
as General Manager, Cloud Service at NJVC, a heavyweight tech contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

We follow Kevin to keep up with cloud computing related technologies and their use in public sector to support net-centric operations. Kevin expertise is reflected in his tweets and that is precisely the reason we follow him.

Twitter Handle: @Kevin_Jackson
Recent Tweet: “NIST releases ‘Bible of cloud implementation’ http://gcn.com/articles/2011/11/04/nist-cloud-tech-roadmap-impact.aspx”
So, that is our top 10 list of people to follow in the cloud computing space. Please feel free to add to this list if you have someone you like following to get your dose of the latest in cloud computing. We would love to hear your thoughts.

I’m contacting you to let you know that your Backupify account needs attention. Recently Twitter made a change restricting third party access to direct messages without re-authorization. As a result, we need you to re-authorize your Twitter account to re-start the backups of your direct messages. Don’t worry, it’s easy.

Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1. Log in to Backupify.

Step 2. Click the “Reauthorize” link next to any Twitter account you have at Backupify.

That’s it. Backupify will then be able to connect to your Twitter account and verify that all your Twitter direct messages are safely backed up.

If you have any questions, feel free to email us at support@backupify.com.

If you have any questions, or receive any email that takes you to a non-Backupify URL, please contact our support team.

The Notifications tab provides a proactive, real-time view of any problems that occur during a Google Apps domain’s regular backup process. This feature enables users to stay connected and informed about the status of their backups. While most backup jobs run without error, a small percentage of backup processes encounter an exception that halts their progress.

Previously there was no direct visibility to these exceptions, often causing confusion and creating uncertainty among our users. The only way that domain admins would know about these failed backups was to click on the history page of each individual user of the domain. Using this complicated process, simple configuration items like authentication errors — the most common cause of a failed backup, cropping up when users alter their account permissions — could be easily missed.

With the arrival of the Notifications tab, such configuration exceptions are noted in Backupify’s main navigation and aggregated on a single page. Admins now have instant notice of these errors and are given a set of simple tools to correct the problem.

fig 1- Screenshot depicting the Notifications feature

When Backupify encounters an error during the backup of a domain, the Notifications tab clearly states the error message received from Google. For the most common errors, Backupify provides simple, step-by-step instructions for solving the problem. Most errors are purely related to account configuration and can be fixed within a matter of minutes by the domain admin. Once the error is corrected, administrators can re-enable the backup process with a single click.

fig. 2- Screenshot depicting our new Notifications help tab

When these configuration problems are fixed and the backup re-enabled, the error alert is cleared from the Notifications tab. Put simply, when it comes to Backupify Notifications, no news is good news. If the error recurs, the problem may require more hands-on support, which Backupify is glad to provide.

At Backupify, we’re always working to bridge the gap between our users and our product. The Notifications tab is the first of many planned features that will make Backupify more useful, effective and intuitive. Stay tuned; the best is yet to come.

A couple important points that these panelists discussed were:

• Federal agencies are just now starting to share best practices with each other
• Officials are finding it hard to consistently identify, capture and retain official records on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
• Each agency is moving in its own direction but there needs to be a unified way for all agencies to retain these records
• There are risks for both engaging and not engaging on social media – If you do engage, you can reach the public at crucial times with pertinent information but you need to be mindful of the necessity of retaining those messages. If you don’t engage, you may miss out on important opportunities yet will avoid losing control of your messaging.

NASA’s social networking manager, Emma Antunes, explained that, “In my experience, retention of records is easy, destruction is hard.” Agencies want to be involved in these mediums to reach the mass public but also realize that once they publish a message, they ultimately lose control of it. In that case, agencies certainly recognize that retention tools are needed in order to keep a copy of every message. “How do we retain legacy records if we don’t control them?” asked Antunes.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s CIO, Darren Ash, explained that their agency approached this issue at a different angle. Before they created social media accounts, they stepped back and looked at their existing retention policies. Ash brought together legal, IT, union and communication managers to determine how these new social media tools could be used to further NRC’s mission while still following a records management strategy. From this meeting, they developed a blog with retention in mind–every 60 days their blog morphs into a PDF to ensure that the content of each post is retained. This blog serves as their main public social communication tool.

Evidently, there are still major steps that federal agencies need to take to get to a level of equilibrium between social sharing and records retention. First, agencies need to proactively discuss best practices together to help each other learn. Next, individual agencies must sensibly sit down and determine the mission of using social media and how they can retain their messages on these mediums. Once this process is streamlined and more fluid among organizations, there will emerge standard practices and a higher level of comfort within this communication channel.

We’ve spoken to many government agencies who have a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter account and have found that a good deal or these organizations are now comfortable sharing agency information with the public. Many have found it extremely useful in spreading emergency notifications. The next step in this process is to determine how they can protect themselves by creating a formalized retention policy.

Does your agency currently use any social media sites? Are your currently implementing a records retention policy? Why or why not?

If you haven’t heard the buzz, here are the 2 main causes to our temporary database downtime:

• Last week, Gmail experienced a significant outage leading to about 15,000 Backupify account signups in TWO days
• Today, we announced a beta version of CloudSight search, a new functionality that will allow you to search across all your backed up accounts to view, download and even restore files automatically.

Due to these two major events, our backup queues got a little larger than normal, so this latest upgrade, while planned, required us to add more database nodes than anticipated. Like most other web apps where data integrity is of the utmost importance, we put our site in maintenance mode when we do an upgrade. Most of the site should still function normally, but you can’t view your archives page.

Don’t worry, your data is fine. However this process may take a day or so to complete. Thus, if you visit your archives page and don’t see your data, don’t be alarmed.

If you have any questions on our system status, follow our Twitter feed for updates.

Thanks for your patience!

Do you know what are the best tools to identify brand evangelists and industry influencers? What if you lose important customer contact information from your Facebook fan page or Twitter account?

Tomorrow at 2pm ET, we are teaming up with two other Boston-based companies, Hubspot and oneforty, in a webinar to walk you through the process of generating customer leads and turning them into brand evangelists.

In this webinar, you will learn:

• How to generate leads in the first place
• How to efficiently monitor conversations and brand mentions
• What tools to use for rewarding advocates
• How to manage and document your conversations on social media

Sign up for the webinar now!

Bonus: All webinar attendees will automatically be entered in an iPad giveaway sponsored by Nimble, a social relationship management solution.

We hope to see you there!

So how could Google let a half million users lose their data in the first place? The answer lies in how Google described the problem initially: “0.29% of Gmail users” experienced a “service disruption.” Less than one-third of 1% of all Gmail accounts got hit by the data purge. From a top-down-perspective, you’d be hard-pressed to complain about 99.71% data integrity. The issue with Google — as always — is scale. When you have 180 million Gmail users, even a statistically small data loss or service outage can result in a mid-sized city’s worth of Gmail accounts being deleted.

For those affected, however, the statistical rarity of their bad luck is cold comfort. 500,000 is roughly the population of Toledo, OH, Grand Rapids, MI, Fresno, CA or Raleigh, NC. It may be only a fraction of a percent in objective Gmail numbers, but we promise losing Raleigh or Grand Rapids (or even Fresno) is still a serious loss.

Imagine your entire Gmail history disappearing. All the attachments you store in your account, gone. The contact list that drives your business, deleted. The communication history you’re required to preserve, erased. The memories and messages that stretch back years, gone in a moment — with only Google’s goodwill and promise that they might return.

At Backupify, we hate to see anybody go through that kind of trauma.

So Backupify is going to do something about it.

From now until 11:59pm Eastern time on March 1, Backupify is giving away a free year of Backupify Pro 100 service to anybody who asks for it.

No joke, no strings attached. Backupify for Gmail archives your complete Gmail history — all the messages, attachments, contacts, labels and communication history that makes your account indispensable. The next time Gmail goes down, your Backupify account has your data at the ready — and you can restore it with a single click. Backupify for Google Calendar archives your complete calendar history, including the past and future appointments you can’t afford to forget. The next time Google Calendar flakes out, you can doublecheck your schedule with your Backupify backups.

With a Backupify Pro 100 account, you get all that and more. That’s 20 GBs of total storage for up to 25 service accounts — including Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter, Google Docs and up to 5 users on your private Google Apps domain — free until March 1, 2012.

Just signup for a free trial of Backupify Pro 100 and use the promo code savegmail. We’ll upgrade you to a free year of Backupify Pro 100 service after you sign up. It’s that simple. But you have to sign up by midnight Eastern on March 1, 2011.

(Note: This promotion has now ended)

Google is good for 99.7% of its users. For the unlucky victims of Google’s margin of error, Backupify is here to pick up the slack. Don’t let the next Gmail outage lottery strike you. Start your free year of Backupify today.

This week, we are taking a different approach to the importance of social media to business by interviewing Rachel Happe of The Community Roundtable. If you aren’t familiar, The Community Roundtable is an online community site where social media, community and social business professionals discuss challenges, celebrate successes and listen to industry experts.

Happe and her co-founder, Jim Storer, initiated the idea for this business when they realized that while people were starting to implement social media for their business, no one was talking about how to manage these social sites and tools. Storer saw an opportunity in the fact that everyone was trying to teach others their own opinions but there was no consolidation of these lessons to make the learning process standardized. The experts, too, were frustrated that there was no place to gather and brainstorm with their peers, so naturally they were thrilled when The Community Roundtable (CR) came about in June of 2009.

Here is what we learned during our interview with Rachel:

Backupify: What are some of the main topics that community members show the most interest in?

Happe: Engagement strategy discussions are our most interactive and dynamic topics. Our community members are interested in learning about the types of content they can publish online, how to promote it through various channels and how to moderate comments. On top of that, members are very interested in how they can measure content success and prove the ROI and benefits to upper management.

On The CR’s side, we push topics on leadership and culture. If a company’s culture is not open to the use of social media and community sites, then they need to do a lot of training to get the support needed for content creation and engagement. This involves advising them when developing a strategy to integrate social media with other marketing initiatives.

We spend a majority of this time discussing strategy, culture, communication and management on social media. People are very interested in what social media is, why it matters, how it fits in with the technology they have and what else they need to be thinking about to execute social media engagement really well.

Backupify: How do you foresee enterprise social media sophistication growing in the next year? Do you think social media will become more or less important to marketing strategies?

Happe: Enterprise social media sophisitcation will grow based on three factors:

1. Unregulated industries: Many big technology companies are now facing significant regulations so they are able to adopt social media fairly easily.
2. Globalization: Issues including online regulations, culture and a sense of humor are all hard to overcome when dealing with customers all over the globe. Some countries have more regulations around social data than others so international companies need to figure out how to handle that.
3. Marketing agency clients: On the marketing side, social media will become the default marketing tool of choice. We’re starting to see a pretty big difference between companies that do it well and others that simply adopt it using old processes.

Overall, social media is integral to marketing efforts going forward but brands need to learn how to do it really well to differentiate themselves.

Backupify: What are experts within your community saying about the evolution of social media tools? How do you foresee community management roles evolving with these trends?

Happe: In regards to social networking, people are clamoring for better channel integration and management, social CRM tools, coordination and efficiency. Many companies need an internal work flow as their current social media management is still messy when it comes to integrating multiple channels into one.

Backupify: Out of all the social media tools both community members and your team use, which one is the most critical to business? How important is it to be able to secure this data in the case of an accidental deletion, server downtime, account hack, etc.?

Happe: Internally, our blog, CRM tool, Twitter, Slideshare and community network are most business-critical. Our Facebook fan page and LinkedIn page are important but we are not too active on those.

In terms of our members, it depends on the type of business they are. For business to business (B2B) members, many have their own community infrastructure and that is most important to them. Big consumer brands are less likely to have their own community site so they rely on social sites liked Facebook and Twitter to develop their brand community.

Essentially, the bigger the organization, the more critical these social tools become. For a large company, online data loss would be disasterious. If they did not have an archiving tool in place, they would lose their audit and response trail, workflow and content, requiring them to start from scratch. This is simply not acceptable once a company has gotten to a certain size.

Overall, it is the content that would be devastating to lose. Companies spend years building up their Facebook fan following, Twitter followers, tweets and blog content. This would be very hard, if not impossible, to restore if they did not have a prior archiving tool set in place.

Backupify: How important do you see support tools like Backupify being to online marketing and communication efforts?

Happe: While some larger companies can afford to back themselves up internally, small companies cannot afford an internal archiving solution. Either way, data redundancy and storage need to happen. Businesses with a significant investment in content and customer relationships would suffer severely if their data was ever lost, so a service like Backupify can be critical.

To learn more about The Community Roundtable, check them out here. To experience how Backupify can help you and your clients safeguard business-critical social media and Google Apps data, check us out here.

Rino_Sardon_How to Use Backupify

Check out the presentation on their site as well.

Have a how-to video or slideshow that you created about Backupify? Leave the link to it below – we’d love to watch it and showcase it on our blog.

First, it needs to be noted that at the time we have two Twitter archive formats. Our ‘old’ version is located on our legacy platform. (You may remember we switched Backupify’s platform from PHP to Ruby on Rails.) The old style of backups reside on the PHP side, the new version resides on Ruby on Rails.

If you are a legacy customer (meaning you have been using our backup system since before October) then your backups most likely reside on the PHP platform. If you’re unsure, log on, go to the Archives tab and see if you are brought to the below screen:

If you see the above screen, lets continue (if you see another screen, this means you’re account and backups reside on our new Rails platform, so read further down for details)

From the drop down menu in the Archives section, choose Twitter. Once clicked, you’ll see a list of links including a comprehensive PDF file we’ve generated that includes your Twitter bio and all of your Tweets (remember, if you signed up with us and had over 3,200 tweets, Twitter’s API only allows us to pull the most recent 3,200. However, every consecutive backup will backup more tweets – after awhile you will have accumulated much more than 3,200 tweets on Backupify). This serves as a timeline for all your Twitter activity. There are currently no links in the PDF to the tweet from Twitter, but you can click on your Twitter handle within the PDF to be directed to your actual Twitter profile.

Your Twitter backup also includes:

• Sent and received direct messages
• Favorited tweets
• Followers and following lists
• Mentions from others
• Your own tweets

When you click on any one of these links, for example ‘Favorites’, you will be brought to a feed of all your activity within this folder. Again, you will not be brought to any individual tweet, direct message, or mention when you click on a link, but you will be brought to that specific part of your profile, such as the ‘Favorites’ section.

If you’re on the new Rails Platform, you will see the following Archives screen:

Note: If you are on the old platform and want to migrate to the new platform, simply click on the box to the right (see photo here) once you log on and you will automatically be transferred to the new system. We are in the process of moving all legacy Twitter users from our PHP platform to the Rails platform. Soon, you will not have to switch between platforms and there will be one standard Twitter backup version. Please bear with us during this transition period.

From the Rails Archive section, select the desired Twitter account of which you would like to view archives. Right now, this data might not make much sense to you, but trust us, all the necessary data is there in full when Twitter allows us to restore (Read here as to why we cannot yet restore Twitter).

What you will see is a list of tweet data including the tweet ID number, node type, and the day it was backed up. When you click on ‘Details’ to the left, you will see this. Since you can’t do much with this data until restore is available, we have also made available a PDF to visualize your tweets in a sensible format. Click ‘Generate Twitter PDF Book’ and you will be emailed this document shortly after.

While we realize these archives are not ideal, we are working as hard as we can with what Twitter’s API gives us to allow you to do as much as you can with your archives. The PDF seems to be the most popular feature of our archive formats so far, but we are excited to offer you more to do with this data in the coming months. If there is a particular format or method you’d like to employ to view your Twitter archives, please feel free to let us know in the comments section.

Don’t yet have a Backupify Twitter backup account? Sign up here.

The bottom line answer is that Twitter and Facebook don’t allow us to truly restore data back into the service. This is due to the fact that we can’t ‘backdate’ content to the time it was originally posted. For example, if you lost tweets between October 22 and November 1 and want to input those tweets back to Twitter, there is no way to backdate the tweets to the time and day they were originally published. The only way they could be put back into the service is to have them posted to the current day and time.

We could retweet all your old tweets, but they would hit the Twitter stream today as a giant explosion of content. We really don’t think your followers would like this. We could import all your Facebook statuses back into Facebook, but your friends may think your account has been hacked if they see twenty updates all at once on their news feed — especially if those updates are repeats of posts you made weeks ago. You don’t want to lose a Facebook friend over self-inflicted echo-spam.

We wish this process was easier. As soon as Twitter and Facebook allow backdating of data, we’ll be able to perform a true restore of these services.

For the time being, you can use this data for:

• Assurance that it’s never truly gone
• To save links and photos you’ve shared regardless of if they’re not available on the actual service
• To have in the case of a needed restore when the APIs allow for backdating

Plenty of users just want their lost Facebook photos or misplaced Twitter links back, even if they can’t backdate them into Facebook or Twitter. For those users, Backupify has got your back.

If you think about it for a minute, how spooky would it be if someone hacked your Twitter account? How frightening would it be to find all your emails on Gmail were suddenly lost? How creepy would it be knowing that some unknown person had access to all your data? And how heart throbbingly scary would it be to know that if lost, your data may not be replaceable?

Unfortunately, being subject to an account hack, accidental deletion with no recovery method, or locked out of your account for an unknown period of time can be just as scary, if not more, than “All Hallow’s Eve”.

Fortunately, Backupify has got your back when it comes to safeguarding and protecting your online data. This Halloween, don’t let your data get away and goblins attack your personal online accounts. Sign up today for a free Backupify social media backup account.

Happy Halloween!

According to Newsweek, stock traders weren’t scared off by FINRA’s warning:

Corporate Insight found that 45% of the asset management firms it tracks are employing social media in some form. … [O]f the 41 asset management firms … 17 now feature company-sponsored pages on Facebook and 16 are tweeting on Twitter. Four firms have also launched blogs.

FINRA actually helped financial firms social media adoption along by clearing up the compliance issue, explaining exactly what sorts of records had to be kept in Regulatory Notice 10-06. While a number of specifics are worth reviewing in the notice, the two basic rules firms need to observe are these:

1. A registered principal of every firm must monitor and approve (either before or after posting) all communications made by the firm. In other words, ignorance is not a defense, so it is assumed that a licensed broker or dealer is aware of every communication made via social media under the firm’s name.
2. The firm must produce accurate records of every posting made on the firm’s behalf, in full, at any time. In other words, even if a post has been deleted (or aged past Twitter’s infamous 3200-tweet search limit), a broker or dealer is still responsible for reproducing the post to FINRA’s satisfaction for regulatory review. “Facebook ate my wall post” is not a defense.

Whatever social media platform a financial firm employs, that platform requires an independent archive for compliance purposes. We at Backupify obviously like to think of ourselves as the ideal solution (Try us for free!), but the bottom line is that stock brokers and dealers must use a product to guard against data loss. Otherwise, they risk violating regulatory guidance — and we all know how forgiving financial oversight agencies are these days.

Hope you’ve got a backup plan.

Related articles

• Top 5 Business Reasons to Backup Twitter – Free Account Now! (backupify.com)
• Financial Firms Take to Facebook, Tweeting (newsweek.com)
• Social Media in Highly Regulated Industries – Advice and Insight (blisspr.com)

@jaygarmon Email is the currency of all social media accounts. It’s the digital glue. #contentlou

@robmay opinion piece on Data Liberationhttp://www.technewsworld.com/story/70844.html

@ibackupyourshit don’t let’yo data die all locked up in the cloud.. setting up backupify would make yo’mamma proud

@kristinedziadul @backupifiers good to hear! Orlando has enjoyed the backupify presence but we look forward to being back with the WHQ brain power

@iamashok Excited to be more involved with @backupify from today, fun times ahead! #502toEC2

@bengreene The new @oneforty homepage is great! Absolute one-stop shop for getting the best value out of Twitter.

@vikchadha Backupify Secures $4.5 Million In a Series A Financing Round http://lnkd.in/JRut26

@ignat Twitter just suggested me to follow myself.

You can also follow @backupify on Twitter for more updates and tech news!