It is now cliché to say that social media activity by companies is growing exponentially. Companies, hospitals, non-profits, the armed services, insurance companies…. every type of entity can be found on social networking sites with Facebook fan pages and Twitter accounts. The marketing opportunities for companies continue to manifest themselves with directed marketing campaigns, discounts on Foursquare and other location based networking sites, and data mining to analyze social networking activities.

What is not keeping pace with this exponential growth appears to be companies making sure their social media activity is covered by their current insurance policies. An informal survey was conducted in late February 2011 of 700 executives from large companies and associations. Of the people surveyed, only 49 said that they had checked to see if their commercial general liability (CGL) insurance policies cover social media related risks. This number is not that surprising. The majority of companies are still in the process of implementing social media policies, and communicating them to their employees. An even larger number of companies need to update their document retention policies to address their social media activity.