There was a time in recent memory when I thought that media would create almost perfect information, a condition that exists in theoretical economics that makes markets work. However, the more tweets and RSS feeds I read, the more I realise that there is more opportunity to create misinformation than ever before.

As editor of the business news site for yacht racing – yachtracing.biz, I am caught up in a scary trend. The hunger for content by some publishers is so voracious that they have stopped performing any editorial function at all, in favour of lazy, cut and paste practices.

The result is an opportunity for savvy, communications people to reinvent history and flog everything from the America’s Cup to garden centres.

So if you want to create facts using lazy bloggers and other so-called journalists, here is a step by step guide.

1. Create a press release.

Make sure it is full of hyperbole and facts that are hard to verify. Something like: “the largest technology fair in the world.” (This can later be amended to “largest conference of its kind in the world” if you get called out.)

2. Push the press release onto as many platforms as you can…

But make sure you focus on small content providers and social media. Twitter is best because it is only 140 characters and people will re-tweet the link you send without reading the article. This way, someone ‘influential’ will accidentally give the information some credibility. If you concentrate on a niche, then you will know you have done well when 90% of the RSS subject lines are your headline – unchanged from the way you released it.

3. Get credibility

Once the story is seeded on hundreds of little blogs and Twitter feeds and Facebook likes, call up a semi-respectable, traditional news outlet. A great one to try is a ‘local’ or ‘regional’ offshoot of a larger brand, like BBC South West Wales. This allows you to show others that a ‘proper’ news outlet has reported a ‘fact’ which now can’t be questioned.

4. Re-Invest

Now that your hyperbolic PR claim is a fact, repeat step 2. Get as many people as you can to Digg, Tweet, Like, stumbleupon and share the trusted source of your information. You could also now add a Wikipedia entry with a great source, so that no-one can challenge you.

How to deal with those rare, irritating beasts – journalists

In most cases, the steps above should be enough to ensure that your version of events is the one that captures the interest of the Twitterati for at least 9 or 10 seconds before someone else comes up with a better trending hashtag. But sometimes, someone might call ‘Bullshit’ and ask you to clarify or verify your position. Don’t Panic.

There are a few strategies to deal with self-appointed truth seekers.

The most obvious thing to do is to ignore them. Most will have a Klout score of less than 30 and acknowledging they are there just makes more people look in your direction. Other strategies include various forms flattery and ego fluffing, or if they are really good, you can bring them onto your side – perhaps even pay them to make up and distribute facts on your behalf.

Follow these rules and you can make the most of the total absence of fact checking and if you are lucky you will even get a few inbound links.

• Perhaps the michael Jackson impersonator at the cowes yacht haven is designed to make everyone go to bed early! #cowesweek #
• Rim figure surprised me – what rubbish PR they must have RT @iboy: Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S. :: http://bit.ly/9WQzAW #
• looking forward to the artemis challenge tomorrow at cowes week on board with @deecaffari – updates here and on @yachtbusiness #FB #li #
• Have removed the words ‘social media’ from my title on linkedin. They seem redundant for a marketing consultant. #li #
• RT @Oman_Sail: EX40 Team Manager Pete Cumming is blogging all week for the telegraph, catch up with Pete’s report here http://fb.me/G2xVTPQ6 #
• @DuncanForrester it’s a great ride. You’ll enjoy it as long as you jump overboard before it collides with the sea-wall. Have a great week. in reply to DuncanForrester #
• Paddington today. Isle of wight tonight. Cowes for the rest of the week for #cowesweek #

I’ve accused certain people that I follow on Twitter and whose blogs I read about Social Media as suffering from groupthink. There is a certain type of evangelism that refuses to look critically at products and services and instead gets caught up in reinforcing unfounded PR statements.

As a marketing consultant, I move between industries and get exposed to different voices. Looking at new marketing techniques through a ‘sports marketing’ lens gives a different view of the world from an SEO point of view. This week, a couple of reports based on statistical rigour from companies like Forrester and ComScore have shown that the effect of social media might be less than first thought and that location based services are well and truly the bleeding edge of marketing.

My hunch is that had these reports been positive, then the self appointed Social Media gurus / experts / specialists / consultants would have been retweeting and digging and backslapping all round, but instead – relative silence.

The ComScore Report about online shopping behaviour shows that very few people consult social media or blogs in the first instance when buying a computer or consumer electronics. Instead - manufacturer sites and search engines are the driving force.

The Forrester report looks at location based services and the results shouldn’t really be a surprise to anyone who lives outside of a metropolis like London or New York or Melbourne. Forrester finds that 96% of U.S. online adults have never used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt and of those who do, 99%  don’t update these services more than once per week. In fact, only 16% of respondents have never heard of such apps, leaving the vast majority of Americans online still in the dark about location-based apps, which have had the marketing world obsessing over them in recent months.

Apart from the lack of utility that these services provide people, letting your location be known in real time to a large number of people quite a big behaviour change in societies where privacy is highly valued. Nevertheless, in some markets there may be a brand fit between the audience for location based services and a company’s target market. If you are looking to target men between the ages of 19 and 35 who have college degrees, then location based services might be an interesting test for a fraction of your marketing budget.

With all the hype, real numbers based on research and not hearsay get lost, especially when they don’t help the nascent social media ‘industry’ sell consulting.  The lesson, apart from sticking to the fundamentals and viewing new technology as one of many promotional tools, is to widen the voices you listen to.

It’s fashionable to write these – ‘5 tips that will replace years of business experience and distal everything you need to know into less than 500 words’ – type blogs. They are often ‘retweeted’ by people who never read them, but like the headline because it somehow fits with something they think they should be saying.

It seems to be a formula that people consume easily though, so here are my 5 reasons why your business should not be using social media.

1. Because it’s new and cool.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there making social media pitches based purely on fashion. There’s a buzz out there. It’s new and improved. If you don’t have it, you are missing out. Every couple of years, something comes along that changes the way people behave. Just because something is covered by the media, does not mean that real people are using it as part of their everyday lives.

2. Because it’s massive. .

I guarantee you that if you have sat through a social media pitch, that you have been bombarded with figures like ‘If Facebook was a country, it would the 4^th largest in the world’. The country with the 4^th biggest population is Indonesia, yet my bet is that your business has no presence there. What’s more, you probably don’t have any plans to be in Indonesia any time soon. That’s because pure market size is not the only thing that matters to real businesses.

Last week there was a story about how Pepsico were going to use location service FourSquare for marketing purposes. The article reported that FourSquare has a million users. Let’s put that another way – there are about 308 Million people who don’t use FourSquare in the US alone.

3. Because your customers are interacting with each other on social media.

In 2008 there were an estimated 6.5 billion texts sent every month in the UK, but the vast majority were between individuals. There are very few companies (other than mobile networks) that have successfully used SMS text messaging for business.

Just because your customers and potential customers are talking to each other on social media is no guarantee that they want to interact with your business.

4. Because it’s cheap.

Anyone can set up a YouTube account. It doesn’t cost anything to create a Twitter feed or a Facebook page. Creating a LinkedIn Group takes minutes and you can blog away for free on all many of platforms.

Once it’s been set up, you can get an intern or an expert social media consultant to represent your brand assets the best way they see fit, despite in many cases not having any marketing or business credentials.

You’ve probably spent a lot of time and money to create your brand, why risk devaluing one of your most important business assets by cutting corners.

5. Because your competitors are doing it.

I’ve always had a dislike for consultants who think that their technology based model can be applied across industries and businesses without any need for modification. Look out for a social media pitch that tells you that you need to be on social media because there are others in your industry that are doing it. There are probably competitors of yours that do trade-shows or sponsorship or other outdoor advertising that you might not do. Me-too is never a reason to do anything.

1 Reason Your Business Should be Using Social Media.

There are many reasons why your business may benefit from using social media including; better customer service, increased brand awareness, targeted product positioning and understanding your customer’s requirements, but the number one, and only reason that your business should be using social media is…

Because it will deliver you revenue.

Social Media is just another weapon in your sales and marketing arsenal. It has a cost and it has a return. The only reason you should consider using social media for your business is if it is going to have a positive impact on the bottom line.

Value social media the same way you would value any other sales and marketing spend. What are your objectives? How do you know if you have succeeded?

If you are being told that engaging in the conversation is enough and hopefully over time it may lead to sales, then ask yourself how much of your marketing budget you are willing to invest in that hope.

If on the other hand, you are being told how social media can have an impact on key metrics within your business like; transaction frequency, basket value, margin, customer satisfaction and loyalty, market share, recall rate, cost per lead and return on investment, then evaluate those numbers against your current marketing options and make a business decision.

There’s something that bothers me about Twitter. It’s the tendency to become lazy when it comes to ideas and arguments. Complex ideas are boiled down to 140 character headlines. Many people never read the articles linked to, they just make a decision about the content based on the pithy headline and retweet, giving the ideas more credit than it perhaps deserves.

You might think that there would be more written about Twitter and Groupthink, but then, when you consider the characteristics of Groupthink it is perhaps not so surprising.

On the surface, Twitter provides a wide variety of viewpoints created by a diverse pool of individuals, but think about how many people you follow who have a contrary view to your own.

Consider the following tests for Groupthink that Irving Janis developed in 1977. Does your experience of Twitter have any of the following ‘symptoms’?

1. Illusion of invulnerability –Creates excessive optimism that encourages taking extreme risks.
2. Collective rationalization – Members discount warnings and do not reconsider their assumptions.
3. Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.
4. Stereotyped views of out-groups – Negative views of “enemy” make effective responses to conflict seem unnecessary.
5. Direct pressure on dissenters – Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
6. Self-censorship – Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
7. Illusion of unanimity – The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
8. Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leaders from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.

It’s not just Twitter that can become susceptible to this kind of behaviour. Think about your product development process or the governing body of your favourite sport. Is there diversity of thinking? Are you innovating in a vacuum?

There are remedies if you believe you are at risk of making poor decisions based on either your social media usage or an imbalance in the teams you work with.

Here are some actions you might want to consider.

1. Assign yourself the role of critical evaluator.
2. Routinely discuss ideas with a trusted associate and report back to ‘the group’ on the associate’s reactions.
3. Invite ‘outside’ experts to challenge views of ‘the group’.
4. Find an articulate and knowledgeable devil’s advocate to question assumptions.
5. Set aside time to consider alternative scenarios.

Also consider following a couple of people who might have a contrary view. You don’t have to agree with them, but opening your eyes to a different point of view might help you make more well informed decisions.