The 2012 IBM global CEO study is just out. It once again confirms management is often aware of what needs to change, yet fear acting on their knowledge. 

"CEOs need social media, but many fear it" – IBM

The world’s CEOs believe that in the next five years social media will push past websites, call centres and channel partners to become the No. 2 way to engage customers (after face-to-face communications).

However fear of change is preventing most from actually actioning a Facebook strategy. Many will miss capitalising on this inevitable trend to more agile competitors. Some fears are justified, there is no doubt there is risk involved with social media. Risk isn’t just bad ideas like CommBank’s terrorist Olympics viral video.

Advertisers are now liable for users' Facebook comments

Australia's digital industry is up in arms about a ruling from the ad watchdog, which determined a brand's Facebook page is an ad platform with all its material - including user-generated content - liable under the AANA code.

A recent ruling from the Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) in a complaint against Diageo said it considered Facebook to be a marketing communication tool. The decision changes the landscape of social media advertising with brands liable for content generated by consumers.

In its ruling, the ASB wrote: “The Board considered that the Facebook site of an advertiser is a marketing communication tool over which the advertiser has a reasonable degree of control and could be considered to draw the attention of a segment of the public to a product in a manner calculated to promote or oppose directly or indirectly that product."

Social media advertising regulations and marketing your business

“The Code applies to the content generated by the advertisers as well as material or comments posted by users or friends.”

This is yet another example of how our regulatory frameworks are anachronistic in the era of the Internet. This new world of social media is merely a decade old, yet regulators like ASB are employing codes written in the steam age when ads were only mass distributed by printing press. Publishers had control of what letters to the editor were published with an eye on libel. But the pace of public postings on Facebook makes such a process for an editor of a business Facebook page less that of a publisher, more one of the town crier who invites people to the town square but can’t predict what the crowd will yell about loudest.

Right now the judiciary has similarly lacked an ability to adapt as the public circumvents contempt of court rules and out accused on Facebook, passing collective judgement before a trial. No blurred pictures of the accused’s face like in the press or on TV. Think the Kings Cross king hitter, perhaps fuelled by Diageo products. Lets see a post on a liquor brand’s Facebook about the next alcohol induced murder and ponder the consequences. It's going to happen, irrespective of what the ASB stipulates.

So if CEOs are going to increasingly use Facebook for a dialogue with prospects, we will need to be extremely diligent to keep on the right side of the law, irrespective of how sensible we think regulations are today.