Hootsuite taps Proofpoint for AI-powered predictive compliance tool

Social media management platform Hootsuite and enterprise security company Proofpoint have partnered to ensure social media posts don’t hurt your brand. Hootsuite Enterprise customers who also subscribe to Proofpoint Social Syndicate can now access a new Predictive Compliance feature in Hootsuite’s dashboard. The AI-powered feature is designed to help companies in heavily regulated industries.

Hootsuite’s social media management platform has 18 million users. Some of its largest customers have compliance and regulatory requirements — real-time compliance verification is meant to help them create compliant social media posts. Because Hootsuite doesn’t have the natural language processing chops, it’s leaning on Proofpoint to help with compliance of social media content.

Hootsuite hopes Predictive Compliance will teach users in regulated industries about compliance policies as they compose social media messages. Furthermore, the pitch is this will lead to reduced workloads for compliance officers because all employees will be staying within policy.

How Predictive Compliance works

Here’s how the feature works. Social media posts created within Hootsuite’s compose platform are automatically screened. As you type a social media message, you will be alerted in real time of compliance policy violations. If you post something that violates guidelines, your ability to post can be set to automatically pause until you fix the errors. You can learn and correct common compliance mistakes as you go, rather than simply having your content rejected. If the tool is wrong, you can flag the content for an administrator at your company (not Hootsuite or Proofpoint) to manually approve it.

Proofpoint Social Syndicate is lexicon- and phrasing-based. It uses a natural language processing engine to determine whether your social media content is compliant. The company offers a slew of preconfigured rules. Some policies specifically mirror the regulations from FINRA, HIPAA, SEC, FTC, FFIEC, FCA, and so on.

You can also define your own rules to determine what is in and out of bounds for your content. For example, you may want to use the rule builder to ensure that your employees don’t mention any of your competitors in their social media posts.

Use cases

Hootsuite offered a few use cases for Predictive Compliance:

• Brands partnered with a professional sports league or player are often restricted about what they can say. Companies can set up rules to ensure employees comply with the strict guidelines to protect the partnership.
• Licensed Registered Representatives can lose their licenses if they don’t adhere to strict guidelines around advertising. For instance, representatives cannot guarantee investment performance — and that includes social media posts.
• Companies that have government clients can make sure their employees are not critical of government or politicians in their social media posts.

In general, companies can ensure their employees don’t curse or behave unprofessionally while representing their brand.

“Consider that you’re a financial services customer and want to roll out social quite broadly within your organization,” Ryan Donovan, Hootsuite SVP of product and technology, told VentureBeat. “But you don’t want someone saying the wrong thing on social so you don’t end up in an Elon Musk-like situation. What this is going to do is give you a real-time compliance check as part of the posting experience. So that you can avoid the Elon Musk-like scenarios in real time while still giving the end user some course corrective suggestions and allow them to tweak their post so that it is compliant and then self-publish it — all without having the time delay of workflow approval going to somebody else, having it come back hours or a day later, and then just go[ing] through the whole lag time.”