Dan Brahmy
Dan Brahmy

As more consumers turn to social media and online forums for their news, online listening tools can give brands an opportunity to enhance their marketing efforts and overall presence on these platforms. By incorporating tools that effectively detect disinformation into their PR/communication strategies, brands can stay ahead of the curve and put themselves in the best position to connect with their audiences.

Taking a deeper look at online conversations by monitoring what consumers are saying is an effective way to oversee your brand. While most brands know the importance of monitoring their accounts and keywords for general activity, smart brands take their monitoring further, isolating key insights to anticipate consumer trends, good and bad.

Go a step further than traditional keyword monitoring by looking out for unusual behaviors around your usual keywords and those who typically fall into your target audience. You should also monitor and assess competitor and category chatter. By keeping apprised of your audience’s normal behavior, it’s easier to spot outliers and potential disinformation campaigns before they have a chance to make an impact.

Whether you're analyzing fake conversations or just negative ones, active monitoring can help brands understand narratives, discover trends and uncover more-in-depth insights into what consumers are saying—insights that can be applied to a PR/communication strategy.

Once an online conversation is taking place, the ability to identify where the information is coming from (and who it reaches) is crucial to understanding how to best proceed. Data generated through machine learning can help uncover what kickstarted these discussions, ranging from news events to competitor posts or even fake accounts.

Although many brands can spot consumers acting with bad intent after the fact, artificial intelligence tech can enable brands to detect these conversations well in advance, in addition to identifying fake profiles that contribute to the spread of disinformation. With the help of AI software, brands can identify accounts spreading misinformation and quickly categorize campaigns or disinformation into Real, Fake, or Bad (nefarious intent). Once categorized, PR professionals can craft the most appropriate response.

When it comes to disinformation, it’s easy to identify the subject of online chatter. But brands need to better position themselves to take swift action by investing in tools that pinpoint the origins of these conversations, examining both real and fake accounts to determine how and where the disinformation spreads. Brands who can identify communities and networks of online “users” are in the best position to approach disinformation campaigns and respond in a timely and appropriate fashion.

With a deeper analysis of online conversations and the sources sharing the information, brands can not only curb the negative effects of disinformation, but also craft a proactive media relations strategy to mitigate it going forward.

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Dan Brahmy is the co-founder and CEO of Cyabra, a SaaS platform that uses AI to detect disinformation online and filter the real from the fake.