By bbr

by Kelly Lucas, marketing and social media manager

If you think people aren’t really paying that much attention to what’s said on social media, think again. Yesterday, stocks took a brief nose-dive when the Associated Press tweeted out the announcement that there had been explosions at the White House that had injured President Obama. The problem was that the story wasn’t true. The AP Twitter account had been hacked and the tweet was a hoax. Given the still very recent Boston Marathon bombings and MIT shooting, ricin-laced envelopes to politicians and the Texas fertilizer plant explosion, it makes sense that people were jumpy and had a knee-jerk reaction.

But it wasn’t just a few people reading tweets and then panicking. As reported by USA Today, traders in the New York Stock Exchange use computerized trading programs that buy and sell stocks based on information gleaned from social media sites. This just goes to illustrate that very large movers and shakers put a great deal of stock, both literally and figuratively, in the goings-on of Twitter. From this same article:

“This is yet another reminder that social media isn’t simply banal messages about breakfast between teenagers, but that it can have massive, real-world consequences,” says Jeff Hancock, a Cornell University communications and information science professor. “Our trust of social media has reached new levels. (Wall Street’s) response also highlights that humans have a built-in truth bias to believe what others say. Although there is a lot of suspicion about the Internet in general, the truth bias is alive and well with social media.”

So what can we learn from all of this? Even if you aren’t a huge publicly traded company that could quickly lose stock value based on a hoax or disparaging tweet, you could still lose reputational value in the eyes of a potential client. If there are negative messages being sent about you, regardless of whether they are true or not, they can have an enormous impact on your firm. It’s important to pay attention to the messages being sent about your brand and try to stay in control of it as much as possible. A couple of ways to stay on top of what others say about you include:

Twitter Connect: Regularly check the “Connect” function located at the top of your Twitter page to see if you’ve been mentioned by other Twitter users.

Google Alerts: Set up a Google Alert for your name, your firm’s name and the names of partners and key players and have them sent to your email. This will notify you when your names are mentioned online.

The days of rolling your eyes at, or acting above, social media are over. It pays to know what is going on and what people are saying about your firm. If you need help, let us know.