Social media: A watching brief

In the weeks leading up to last Christmas, Facebook announced that it was considering adding more “emotional” responses to posts made on news feeds, including updates. Some media channels picked up on this and immediately assumed this meant the introduction of a “dislike” button. At a question and answer session in California, founder Mark Zuckerberg revealed it was one of the most requested tools that users had asked for.

What Zuckerberg actually said was that Facebook was considering more relevant ways to express “sad” emotions, rather than a simple dislike option, but even so it would have to ensure that the feature was not used for malicious purposes. However, based on existing technology, this would be quite a hard task and something that immediately had brand owners across the world raising an eyebrow in concern.

At present Facebook’s 1.39 billion active monthly users hit the “like” button around 4.5 billion times a day. Many of those will be legitimate ways of showing approval or acknowledgement of a post, update or a brand, but some are likely to be fake.

Unfortunately, it is simply too easy to manipulate the popularity of something on Facebook. A simple search on Google for “Facebook likes” reveals that 1,000 Facebook profile page likes can be bought for less than £20 ($30). Want more? How about 5,000 for less than £70? If you can buy “likes” today, how long will it take these organisations to start offering “dislikes” or other such “sad” emotions that could be targeted against a brand owner’s Facebook presence?

A matter of trust

But that’s not the only issue. Social media are a part of our online life today, and 71% of online adults use Facebook every month (according to the Pew Research Centre.) We are more trusting of what we see online today than we ever have been. If we see an advert or a post on Facebook that has hundreds or thousands of “likes” we are likely to believe it is genuine.

The same is true of followers on other networks such as Twitter and Instagram. And if we believe it is genuine why wouldn’t we then follow links on these pages to external websites that have e-commerce enabled?

So a fraudster who wants to gain credibility needs only to buy some Facebook likes and he or she is free to commence a scam. The approvals soon start appearing via an automated service or through a network of willing ‘workers’, all happy to press a button or two in exchange for a small payment. While Facebook has tried to improve its technology to identify and remove these ‘click farms’, it is a difficult job, especially when it is carried out by humans.

The addition of a “dislike” button is therefore a good thing in this instance. Anyone who has been duped could make their feelings and experience known at the click of a button. Unfortunately, the owner of the page still has the ultimate administrative control and could simply remove any comments that display negative sentiment.

"A fraudster who wants to gain credibility needs only to buy some Facebook likes and he or she is free to commence a scam."

Most major brands now consider Facebook as a key part of their online digital strategy, both in terms of managing their own company page as well as using Facebook’s targeted advertising model, which is able to use more refined social and demographic data than Google’s AdWords can.

It is understandable that major brand owners are concerned about monitoring what is said across global networks such as Facebook. It is no longer enough just to have one or two employees who keep a casual watch on what is posted on social media. Brand and reputational damage can happen in a matter of seconds, and it is possible that hundreds of thousands of people around the world may be aware of a problem before the brand owner is, thanks to the viral nature of social media.

Consequently, social media monitoring is becoming one of the most important weapons used by organisations big and small in the battle against online brand abuse. Brand owners have to protect themselves not only against cyber criminals who set up copy-cat social media personas with the ultimate aim of fraudulently taking cash through false pretences, but also against reputational damage from what people post about the brand.

A Facebook post that contains lies and damaging comments about a brand can very quickly attract Facebook “likes”, either through legitimate users or those purchased in bulk. A tweet can pass around the world via retweets or hashtags in a matter of seconds, which makes the monitoring of what is being said, where and when, incredibly difficult.

Adding a feature on a network that is used by one in five people around the globe today and which will give dissenters an immediate voice is a massive concern. You could argue that it is fundamental to the internet and a basic human right of freedom of expression and speech, but there also have to be mechanisms to ensure that it is not used maliciously by those who want to profit from damaging the reputation of others.

Gripe sites

At the same time that brand owners are raising concerns about changes to how social media networks reflect sentiment, developments in the domain name space have also caused many organisations to cry foul. The .sucks new generic top-level domain (gTLD) was being prepared for launch in late March, despite concerns raised by brand owners since it was announced in June 2012 that there had been an application for the TLD.

While the registry behind .sucks, Vox Populi, has sold the vision of the TLD as “a place designed to help consumers find their voices and allow companies to find the value in criticism”, few organisations so far, based on media reports, can see the positive side of the domain name, especially coupled with a very high registration cost in the trademark sunrise period. Time will tell whether the gTLD will succeed or not.

The ever-expanding digital world undoubtedly offers huge opportunities for brand owners to quickly and cost-effectively reach new customers across the globe, but it also poses some big headaches for which the only real answers are centred on allocating more of the marketing budget to brand protection.

Stuart Fuller is director of commercial operations at  NetNames. He has experience in brand protection, both in retail and corporate re-sale markets. He can be contacted at: stuart.fuller@netnames.com