Earlier this month FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, published Regulatory Notice 10-06, Social Media Web Sites: Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web sites. This is of particular interest for a couple of reasons. First, there are still a lot of people that believe that social networking sites either aren't used for business, or shouldn't be used for business. Now, this is nothing new - we saw similar positions and assertions around instant messaging, and before that around email, and probably the telephone before that. The publication of this note seems to contradict both of those ideas - clearly the question has arisen as to how financial services firms can use these tools for business.

“Why We Won’t Work for You: Many bright, young minds elude large corporate employers. We will seek to gain an understanding from these individuals why the traditional corporate workplace, policies and social network lacks appeal. Discussions will focus on managing policies surrounding social networking in the workplace and how to effectively engage the commitment and maximize the contributions of this valuable corporate resource.”

Blogs are simply publishing platforms that make it easy for users to create and publish content. Most traditional publishing platforms require a bit of a learning curve, whether for the tool itself or for the markup language used to encode the content. Many ARMA chapters for example have a hard time maintaining their websites because that requires someone to know HTML, probably Javascript, and maybe even a particular tool like Microsoft FrontPage or Adobe Dreamweaver.