Managing bad or embarrassing content is tricky

I was on vacation for the past several weeks and it feels good to be back in the swing of things. While I was gone I came across this New York Times article on the issues related to the long tail of information, especially when it's bad, embarrassing or even wrong.

The article got me thinking that content management is often not about what we want to keep and find, but what we want to delete and get rid of. On a personal level that might mean deleting an embarrassing photo taken during an adolescent or college transgression. For a business, it might mean deleting or finding a way to counter false or misleading information.

Fighting misinformation

One issue that comes up is fighting wrong information spread over internal or external social networks.

When I was at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in June I spoke to Rob Howard, who is CTO at Telligent. He related the story of one client who found that misinformation was being spread about security on the company's new internal social network. The system administrators wrote a blog post refuting the bad information and explaining that the rumor was not true, but the bad information was alive and well and living on the system.

Howard suggested that the "bad information" shouldn't go away, but it should direct users to the corrected information. "You should still find original information, but it should direct you to right piece of data," he said. He said it was important that the system find all of the pieces of related data (rather than delete or suppress the bad information), but it should relate to the corrected data at the same time.

It happens to individuals and companies

The NYT article related the story of a young woman who posted a party picture on MySpace several years ago and ended up getting kicked out of her college because of it. Whether you are an individual like this poor young woman or a company trying to fight a similar public perception issue, in the age of Facebook and other social networks, it's hard to pull back information once it goes public.

That's why some organizations are putting delete-by dates on content. I'm not sure how this would work in practice, especially when for-profit, public companies are involved, or if it's even possible for a public figure--company or individual--to delete bad, misleading or just mortifying information, but clearly, situations like the case cited in the article call for some sort of solution.

So as you think about how you manage your own company's content or even your individual content stream online, you do need to be considering not just how to preserve and protect content, but how and when to delete it, and what that means to the concept of the public record.

These are clearly not easy issues to understand and there are no simple answers, but we need to be thinking about these problems moving forward because in the age of social networking, it's hard to make stuff go away. - Ron