The antisocial side of social media

Can your brand survive Facebookers, MySpacers and bloggers?

As Internet users spend more time connecting via social networking channels, companies of all sizes in all sectors are facing new and changing risks.

Overwhelmingly negative chatter, for example, could potentially compromise the value of the brand. More ominously, unauthorized representatives using social networking channels to illicitly represent your brand could wreck your branding efforts and compromise future marketing efforts.

You can’t afford to ignore this. If you're not monitoring the entire Web to determine how your brand is being used, you could be vulnerable to having your brand distorted and damaged.

Social networking’s growth is a double-edged sword for most businesses. On the one hand, these tools accelerate the spread of brand-related messages through a target audience. They allow companies to rapidly and inexpensively connect with large groups of individuals in a highly interactive and value-added manner. On the other hand, these services can be abused. While some activities are merely annoying, criminals can seriously damage the value of your brand by:

• Redirecting traffic to an unauthorized mirror site
• Illicitly selling counterfeit or gray market products
• Associating your brand with questionable activities such as pornography or crime
• Virally distributing mistruths about your brand

Unlike traditional media, which use a series of well-defined editorial processes to control what gets posted, social media contain no such gateways. Any user – even an anonymous one – can post anything, anywhere. An ill-researched, negative review, for example, could damage branding efforts during a product launch. Even a simple blog comment can send the wrong message.

Worse, these platforms can be used as easy-to-configure bases to launch traffic diversion and brand hijacking activities. The tools are sophisticated enough that legitimate-looking mirror sites are relatively easy for anyone to set up.

The viral nature of some of these services – thanks to their almost universal use of Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, to distribute content – allow rumours and other negative messages related to a product or service to spread to a broad audience before the company becomes aware that there’s a problem.

To counter the threat, companies must actively scan the social media landscape to better understand who’s appropriating the brand and whether these activities represent an ongoing risk. They must also know who’s talking about them, where the conversations are happening and what’s being said. Organizations don’t necessarily need to incorporate social media-based marketing efforts into their own communications plans. They simply need to recognize that social networking activities are a new breeding ground for brand-compromising activities.

Despite the potential marketing benefits for enterprises in all sectors, the risks to a company’s brand are significant. Because of social media’s large and growing popularity among everyday consumers, criminals are flocking here as well and transitioning their illicit activities to these new online communities. Companies must invest sufficient resources to listen in on the conversation and respond appropriately when social networking turns antisocial.