Professor Gilmore, a social media law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, just posted an excellent presentation outlining FINRA’s current stance on social media and financial firms. For those looking to pickup a copy of the presentation click HERE. The presentation entitled “FINRA’s 10 Commandments of Social Media Engagement for Financial Firms” discusses Regulatory 10-06 (Guidance on Blogs and Social Networking Web Sites) and lays out 10 rules to consider as you roll out your social media platform, which are as follows:

1. Retain all tweets and posts.
2. Apply the “Suitability Rule”
3. Adopt policies and procedures for tweets and posts recommending specific investment products.
4. A blog is an “interactive electronic forum” and must be supervised
5. Principals are required to approve avatars, profiles, design and supervise tweets and posts
6. All social media communications are to be supervised
7. Financial advisors are to be trained to tweet and post and not present undue risks to investors
8. Respect entanglement and adoption theories
9. Provide a disclaimer to avoid entanglement by customer or other 3^rd party content
10. Have guidelines and screen 3^rd party postings.

Philip Saunders founded IsoVentures in 2008 following a 10-year career on Wall Street where he served in a variety of research, sales, and trading roles.  With the intention of bringing ‘Wall Street’ type research to the broader retail market, Mr. Saunders developed several trading and investing online businesses focused primarily on options trading strategies. These businesses have evolved into niche-specific hubs of trading information and promotion stretching across all major asset classes.

Mr. Philip A. Saunders holds an MBA from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a BSE in Civil Engineering and Operations Research from Princeton University.