Electronically Stored Social Information (ESSI) and eDiscovery

Anyone with a PC or mobile device and an Internet connection realizes that the use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and even YouTube is increasing at an accellerating rate.

However, it is sometimes hard to truly understand how quickly the amount of data that is invovled in social media is actually growing.

Banking2020.com updated its social media statistics in an article posted on October 19, 2011, titled, "Social Media Statistics: By-the-Numbers, October 2011".

 According to the article:

• $400,000,000 in ad revenue is projected for Twitter by 2013, up from $139.5 million in 2011 (Source: eMarketer)
• 7,432,307 job changes have been tracked by LinkedIn since 2009 (Source: LinkedIn)
• 68% of social media users go to social networking sites to read product reviews (Source: Nielsen)
• 59% of B2B purchase decision makers use a smartphone to research potential purchases (Source: eMarketer)
• 58% of social media users go to social networking sites to learn about or research products (Source: Nielsen)
• 1,600 advertisers are now using the Twitter platform for advertising (Source: Twitter)
• 53% of active adult social networkers follow a brand, while 32% follow a celebrity (Source: Nielsen)
• 40% of social media users access social media content from their mobile phones (Source: Nielsen)
• $1.23 billion will be spent by US advertisers on mobile advertising this year, up from $743 million in 2010

Without stating the obvious, I would image that with all of this Electronically Stored Social Information (ESSI), it just a matter of time before everyone involved in litigation is going to have to be able to get forensically sound access to this evidence.  And, they are going to have to have a more sophisticated methodology and associated technology than screen scraping and Excel spreadsheets.

Over the next few weeks, I will be invetigating the tools that are available to collect and process social media evidence and will be publishing my findings.