The rapid growth of social networking Web sites in the workplace means companies can no longer ignore them. Companies should consider whether their current electronic communications policies are sufficient to cover social networking sites.
If one asked practitioners and judges to describe the type of electronically stored information at issue in e-discovery cases, most of the time the answer would be “e-mail” or possibly “Microsoft Office files.” In fact, there is a dearth of federal e-discovery decisions on other types of ESI. Whereas a decade ago e-mail was often excluded from discovery as part of an unspoken agreement between parties, today all sorts of electronic communications are potentially discoverable. User activity on social networking sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace warrant serious concern.
