Is social media content reliable? Not always. Is it useful? Very. Content that is produced these days is published at amazing speeds – and while there are still good quality content on the web, there is a large amount of content just produced for content’s sake. The over clutter of SEO driven content is most likely the reason why Google changes its algorithm every other day. Social content however, still has some good finds. The beauty of social content is that it is usually the raw opinions of the account holders as they remain relatively anonymous. However this luxury may soon be less apparent as organisations enforce social media guidelines within their companies.

Mashable has just released an article on how stock brokers are considering using social media content to support their trading decisions, and it’s not a bad idea. I’m not surprised if countless amounts of highly confidential business information is leaked online. The hard part is distinguishing what information is valid and what information is simply opinion. Social media monitoring tools are still not sophisticated enough to do a lot of analytical legwork that can only be done by humans.

I’m sure rumors and here say have long been part of the purchase decision of many analysts, social media content is simply moving the same concept online. Perhaps we can start to see if this new school of thought is more successful than the old school way. Social experiment anyone?

For more detail on this issue please refer to the Mashable article.