FINRA states “Social networking sites also contain non-static, real-time communications, such as interactive posts on sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The portion of a social networking site that provides for these interactive communications constitutes an interactive electronic forum, and firms are not required to have a registered principal approve these communications prior to use. Of course, firms still must supervise these communications, as discussed below.”

The key part of this is the discussion around the real-time communications. Tweets, status updates, comments are all examples of this. Static content like your profile would need to be pre-approved by a registered principle.

This is the exact process our clients are implementing. We’ve actually mapped every possible communication that can occur on a social network in our system and then work without clients to execute their policy whether that content needs to be pre-approved, captured and retained or blocked in its entirety.

With that said it is impossible to cover all scenarios with a single black and white statement, as Doug correctly points out. I think the key is for firms to adopt solutions that give them the flexibility to modify their policy programmatically so should their risk profile or the rules change they can modify how they deal with each situation.

I hope this helps.

The answer is going to vary from platform to platform. personally, I don’t think the distinction between static content and interactive content is all that meaningful. In many sites, changing your profile pushes it into other people stream for interactivity.

I was disappointed by the regulatory notice. It really does not add much in the way of guidance or clarification.

On the other hand, you can’t set rules for how to use a particular platform because their features change so rapidly.

To answer Scott’s question wall posts would not be considered static content, they are referring to the information surrounding the page as you describe.