This may sounds obvious to most (though perhaps not to some knucklehead celebrities such as Ashley Cole) but when you’re going through a divorce, don’t go and post photos of your new woman on Facebook when you still have your estranged wife or her friends linked to your profile.
Now, Ashley Cole hasn’t done this himself (though that could have been merely due to the social networking ban the England team faced while they were in South Africa, so stay tuned) but it is incredibly common according to US divorce lawyers; so common in fact that divorce lawyers in the US regularly use Facebook as a means of gathering evidence – and it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
According to figures from the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, a monumental (and frightening) 81% of people involved in divorce cases in the US have either used evidence gathered from social networking websites, or faced it! The sites in question include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and even business website LinkedIn and video sharing site YouTube – the mind boggles as to what people must be uploading to YouTube.
Facebook is the biggest source of evidence online for divorce lawyers, with 66% of all Internet evidence coming from the website. 15% of evidence from online sources comes from MySpace, and just 5% from Twitter.
Linda Lea Viken is the president of the American (more…)
Social media optimisation, or SMO, is something that many companies are doing with their websites as part of 
