We should all now be fully aware of the potential advantages of using social media as part of your digital marketing strategy, however, there are some dangers of social media.

It’s quite difficult and time consuming trying to monitor what is being said about your company elsewhere online.  It’s important for organisations to manage their presence online now more than ever before.

It can be very damaging to a company if negative articles have been written online, especially if they are untrue. Amazingly, false posts may become a thing of the past as a system is currently in the process of being built that will act as a lie detector capable of verifying rumours.

The system will aim to tell if a post is true in real time and will start off by being used to help organisations, including governments and emergency services, to respond more effectively to events. For example, it could allow the emergency services to stop a lie  from spreading in order to keep a situation calm.

Dr Kalina Bontcheva, lead researcher on the project at the University of Sheffield has said: “There was a suggestion after the 2011 riots that social networks should have been shut down, to prevent the rioters using them to organise,” he went on to say: “But social networks also provide useful information. The problem is that it all happens so fast and we can’t quickly sort truth from lies.”

Researchers will be studying conversations on social networks to see how they evolve. Sources will then be checked to see if the information can be confirmed or denied. If this technology could be harnessed for companies it could save a lot of damage control  for them in the future.

The positives of using social media definitely outweigh the negatives, but with technology like this being developed, even the negatives could become a thing of the past!

Source: BBC News