Brinker Capital
The Challenge
- Taking Advantage of Social Media without Violating Regulations
The Solution
- The Fastest Path to Social Media Compliance
The Results
- Improved Customer Communications via Safe and Secure Social Tools
The Challenge
Taking Advantage of Social Media without Violating Regulations
Finding new ways to engage with customers, prospects and partners is a must for Brinker Capital, an investment management firm based in Berwyn, PA. Already reliant on Salesforce. com to support its sales and marketing initiatives, the company decided to take advantage of the solution’s collaboration functionality – Salesforce Chatter – in order to better connect with financial advisors on sales opportunities.
However, information shared within Chatter is not automatically stored as read-only, retained or searchable as required by SEC and FINRA regulations – providing no guarantee that data sent one day will be available for review the next. Brinker Capital initially turned to another third-party archiving vendor to manage the capture of Chatter messages.
“The archiving of social media content is a critical component of our compliance strategy because improper use of these tools can lead to a misrepresentation of our brand and/or regulatory fines,” said Brendan McConnell, Chief Operating Officer at Brinker Capital.
Unfortunately, the firm’s archiving choice was complex to set up and administer, making the solution time-consuming to manage. Plus, there was no easy way to search for content across multiple sources, hindering eDiscovery requests. When the archiving vendor was acquired, Brinker Capital decided it was time to find a new solution that was easy to use, would reduce the burden on IT and could seamlessly support the firm’s social media use.
“It was obvious that Proofpoint was the best solution for us as it met all of our requirements and could be deployed in the cloud,” said McConnell. “In addition, the product was flexible enough to utilize our existing archived data, eliminating the need to review past content in a separate archive.
The Solution
The Fastest Path to Social Media Compliance
Proofpoint Archiver for Chatter is a module of Proofpoint Social Platform for Archiving, which serves as an extensible platform for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Yammer, providing Brinker Capital with a single solution to meet regulatory compliance requirements for all social media communications.
Unlike legacy, on-premise archiving tools that introduce complex, multi-step deployments, Proofpoint Archiver was installed and configured in Brinker Capital’s Salesforce.com environment within an hour.
“Proofpoint Archiver for Chatter is simple to set up, meets SEC and FINRA requirements and gives us the ability to search multiple content types,” said McConnell. “It’s an invaluable, goto platform that lets us capitalize on social media to attract and retain customers.”
Proofpoint Archiver for Chatter archives all Chatter-related conversational content by converting user content to email form in real-time - even if a user deletes that content. That means that all elements related to a post are included in the archive email, capturing the complete conversation thread and all parties involved in the communication. This allows Brinker Capital’s compliance team to view the entire context of content in each captured item if need be.
“Proofpoint makes it easy for us to create and apply policy-based controls to capture social content so that it can be managed as any other critical information asset,” said McConnell. “This simplifies our compliance activities, providing the peace of mind that we’re capturing and retaining content exactly as we should.”
The Results
Improved Customer Communications via Safe and Secure Social Tools
As a result of deploying Proofpoint, Brinker Capital has expanded its use of social media, allowing employees to use desired tools to strengthen day-to-day communications. Brinker credits Proofpoint’s advanced, built-in functionality, such as being able to set user-specific journaling destinations – with simplifying social media compliance.
“We like to be ahead of the curve when it comes to establishing and managing customer relationships,” said McConnell. “Proofpoint allows us to archive as many social media types as desired, providing a future-proof solution to support us in the years ahead.”