Many brands wrongly believe that any content appearing on the pages of a third party social site (particularly the big four of Bebo, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube) will be ‘safe’, as the networks have a legal responsibility to check content for illegal or abusive content. Not so. Most of the sites have a ‘take down’ policy, which means that if illegal or defamatory content is reported, it has a right to remove it. But networks don’t actively police content or accept liability for everything on their sites – it simply isn’t practical for them to do so.

So what’s the risk to brands? The most important thing to consider is the safety of users, particularly brands that are marketing to children or teenagers. The importance of providing a safe environment for children goes without saying, and brands have a duty to ensure that young people are not exposed to abuse, bullying or even illegal content posted by unscrupulous users of official social network pages.

But there is also a reputation risk. Like it or not, content posted on a branded page will be associated with the company it belongs to. No responsible company wants to be associated with bullying or inappropriate content. On a practical level, users won’t come back to a site that is rendered unusable by people posting comment spam or irrelevant messages. Many users will assume that brands check the content that goes onto thier pages and so, if (for example) racist comments were to appear on a YouTube channel, users might assume the brand endorses those comments.

There are also legal implications of course, as in certain circumstances brands might be viewed as the publishers of the defamatory comment or copyright image (we’ve written more about this here). However, some brands still believe in their audiences enough to assume they don’t need to filter the content they’ll upload. The nature of social networks means that they are inherently open to public content (and therefore public abuse) – not just trusted ‘fans’ of a brand. No matter how much a brand trusts its target audience, you simply can’t guarantee that someone with bad intentions won’t infiltrate a site aimed at a younger audience. If brands are to embrace social networks as an important part of a media strategy, they must do so in a way that protects their users and their reputations.

Tamara is CEO and founder of eModeration.