Food risk communicators urged to increase social media presence

BRUSSELS -A place where anything and everything is discussed, social media is a communication tool that food safety professionals should seriously utilise to spread fact and to watch for misinformation.

The scientific paper ‘The use of social media in food risk and benefit communication’ points this out, as some two billion people worldwide have access to the Internet in 2012 and a large and increasing percentage of them using social media. Published in the leading international journal Trends in Food Science and Technology, the paper was written by researchers from Ghent University and University College Dublin, and a communications company in the UK. It is part of the FoodRisC (Food Risk Communication – perceptions and communication of food risk/benefits across Europe) project, which is funded under the FP7 of the European Commission.

Social media users are playing a fundamental role as disseminators of food risk and benefit information. Monitoring of these online conversations can provide insight into consumers’ perceptions of food issues and allows detection and tracking of impending issues and on-going debates on topics such as genetic modification and animal cloning. Whether inadvertently misconstrued or intentionally altered as a result of vested interests, the broad social media landscape can oftentimes be a minefield of widely disseminated information which is incorrect or misleading.

Greater participation encouraged

Food risk communicators need to be present and pro-active on social media to increase visibility for the general public and key opinion formers (i.e. popular bloggers and journalists), to establish themselves as credible interactive sources of information and to enable timely communication with the public. A social media presence is imperative in order to rapidly address and correct developments containing inaccuracies and misinformation, thus ensuring a momentum does not build up. This is particularly true in food crisis situations where social media can lend itself to the escalation of a full-blown food crisis, and create potentially unwarranted panic and hysteria.

Active involvement with social media, in particular the constant monitoring and correcting of inaccurate information is likely to require considerable effort, resources and long-term expense (the time and cost effectiveness of different popular social media tools are graded low, medium or high in the paper).

Commenting on the review findings, the coordinator of the FoodRisC Research project Professor Patrick Wall said: “There is an increasing trend of private businesses investing in social media. Other risk and benefit communicators, such as food safety authorities, have been slow to use social media and there is a real need to harness this resource, so that it becomes a productive tool for communicating on food risks and benefits.”Nike Air Max 97