As a Sales Professional, how do you know that you are sharing accurate content? How do you know the blog you paid to write is not plagiarized or references fake news? You can lose credibility by sharing or referring fake news in Social Selling. What is truthfulness, what is accurate content, what is real news?

This show explores the topic of accurate content, fake news, enhancing or damaging your own credibility with inaccurate references and much more with international marketing expert and thought leader David Amerland.

David Amerland is an international speaker, author and business journalist. I talk about data mining, search, the social web and how they all converge. The author of 9 books he runs to complex problems involving: marketing, human interaction, AI and personal effectiveness. His upcoming book is The Sniper Mind.

We start the conversation with, what is News v.s. interpretations?
The news is anything that in factual and verifiable by what a number of people have reported with a commitment to minimizing their own biases.  Almost no two people will agree on the interpretation and this is the risk when leading with interpretation or commentary vs just the facts. Everything will have some layer of interpretation and the news to stay credible should clearly keep news and interpretation distinguished.

How to you avoid sharing fake news or inaccurate info?

One is building your own tribe of trusted expert people. Know, what type of information each person can be counted on for providing accurate content and knowing their range of expertise. You want people that are both truthful and knowledgeable.

Another item explored is the risk of the perception bubble:
Be suspicious of your own perception bubble. Where human nature is to amplify their own beliefs and the social world is happy to amplify that back locking us into our own perception bubble. This amplifies our own bias keeping you for getting critical and accurate information. One is having people in your life that forces us to see unique perspectives.

We also need to keep a watchful eye on our own justifications. “The highway to hell is actually paid by 10,000 justification.” Make sure you train yourself to ask “what actually occurred and what is my interpretation” for at the individual level interpretation tend to get collapse over the facts of what actually occurred.

Other topics and questions explored in this show:

• Is the spread of “fake content” or “fake news” a problem for sales professionals?
• What should a sales professional do after they discover that they have shared “fake content?”
• What are some examples of “fake content” that you have seen used by a sales professionals?
• Who’s liable when a sales professional shares “fake content” or “fake news?”
• What are businesses doing to prevent the spread of “fake content” by sales professionals?
• Is there a standard process or procedure you recommend using that isn’t too time-consuming but does a thorough enough job of fact checking to ensure we are sharing accurate content? Where can we go to check the facts to make sure everything is accurate?
• What about the progress of machine learning (AI) in identifying truthfulness. Volume, variety, velocity are relatively easy but veracity is a greater challenge. What Social Sites and Google is doing about “Fake News”.

A few site for checking facts mentioned on the show:
Factcheck.org
Politifact.com
Snopes.com

https://reporterslab.org/fact-checking/ - this one, in particular, has links to fact-checking organizations within specific geographical areas so it is widely applicable.

Other related items related to this discussion that may be of interest:
Wikipedia’s attempt to create more accurate news, “Wikitribune is a news platform that brings journalists and a community of volunteers together.“ :
https://www.wikitribune.com/

Plagiarism checkers:
Plagiarism checker tools for WordPress and beyond:
https://pagely.com/blog/2017/03/best-plagiarism-checker/

An interesting article of one techie doing something to disrupt his own perception bubble
Eager To Burst His Own Bubble, A Techie Made Apps To Randomize His Life
http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2020/06/08/531796329/eager-to-burst-his-own-bubble-a-techie-made-apps-to-randomize-his-life

You can learn more about David Amerland and all his resources at: https://davidamerland.com/
You can also find David Amerland at:
https://thesnipermind.com/ on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/davidamerland , Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidAmerland LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidamerland/

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Audio Run-time: 01:05:06

The Social Selling Podcast by Linking into Sales is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support sales and buying cycles and help them become more proficient in social selling.

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