REDWOOD CITY, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 11, 2014) - Actiance, a provider of end-to-end social business governance for the enterprise, today announced availability of Socialite Feature Control, a new licensing option for Socialite. Socialite allows organizations to control, monitor and capture content and activities posted on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The new licensing option lets organizations that have been reluctant to allow any use of these networks because of information governance or regulatory concerns mitigate risk so their workforce can listen to social conversations on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

According to a July 2013 Forrester Research, Inc. report titled: "The Social Media Legal And Regulatory Landscape", employees across organizations are increasingly using social media for real business purposes, leveraging social to deepen customer relationships, improve team collaboration and strengthen lead-generation efforts. In fact, career-driven information workers, those who are competitive and care more about their job, are almost twice as likely as the rest of the workforce to use social media for work. Considering this, companies need to allow employees to use social media but ensure it's used appropriately by developing social media policies and reinforcing them with appropriate monitoring and oversight. These methods are more than a suggested approach for some organizations in certain industries, as regulatory bodies are beginning to make these baseline internal procedures and controls mandatory for all covered entities.

"All companies, but especially regulated businesses like banks and insurance companies, want flexibility in how they allow their workforce to access public social networks," said Scott Whitney, Vice President of Product Management at Actiance. "The new licensing option for Socialite gives them alternatives, from full access to read-only access, so they can meet their governance and compliance requirements for different employee groups."

On April 2, 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) clarified that public companies can use social networks to announce key information in compliance with Regulation Fair Disclosure (Regulation FD), so long as investors are alerted which networks will be used to disseminate information. The SEC clarification came as a result of Netflix CEO Reed Hasting's post to his personal Facebook page in June 2012 that the company's monthly viewing had exceeded one billion hours for the first time. Neither Netflix nor Hastings had ever used a social network to disclose information before, and the company had not reported the information using a press release or form 8-K filing, subsequently causing confusion about whether social networks were an acceptable way to distribute material information. The SEC ruled that these networks are an effective means of communicating with investors when done broadly public and non-exclusively, so that investors gain access to the information at the same time.

The challenge is that in some organizations, especially within highly regulated industries, employees may be restricted in how they are allowed to participate on public social networks. In other, less regulated industries, organizations are concerned about protecting sensitive information and, because of this, may not be comfortable providing employees with full access to social networks. In these cases, access may be blocked entirely, leaving employees unable to observe social networking activities for business purposes. This is increasingly problematic as more public companies use Facebook and Twitter to release information like financial results, or to announce new products and organizational developments. Without real-time access to social media, employees may find themselves competitively disadvantaged as they do not have access to real-time updates and information found on social networks.

Socialite Feature Control offers a lower-cost solution to this problem. It allows organizations to block or allow content posting and other interactive features of native social network websites when accessed from within the corporate network. This helps organizations provide the right balance between employee access to and control of public social networks. For example, they can allow certain individuals or groups to invite people to their networks or to modify their profiles while restricting everyone else to only being able to read social conversations.

Socialite Feature Control is available today. For more information, contact sales@actiance.com.

About Actiance

Actiance is a global leader in communication, collaboration, and social media governance for the enterprise. Its governance platform is used by millions of professionals across dozens of industries. With the power of communication, collaboration, and social media at their fingertips, Actiance helps professionals everywhere to engage with customers and colleagues so they can unleash social business. The Actiance platform gives organizations the ability to ensure compliance for all their communications channels. It provides real-time content monitoring, centralized policy management, contextual capture of content and smart archiving which improves the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of eDiscovery and helps protect users from malware and accidental or malicious leakage of information. Actiance supports all leading social media, unified communications, collaboration, and IM platforms, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), Twitter, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), IBM, (IBM), Jive (JIVE), Microsoft (MSFT), Cisco (CSCO), and Salesforce.com (CRM).

Actiance is headquartered in Redwood City, California. For more information, visit http://www.actiance.com or call 1-888-349-3223.