Crisis Social Media
Social media refers to mobile and internet technologies that offer a platform for interactional social networking. When most people are asked how best they can use social media, the immediate answer is associated with marketing benefit (Scott, 2013). However, the media can be used to offer more and better services such as providing customer service and crisis management (Qualman, 2009). Organizations often face negative publicity that may cause a crisis hence need to find crises management techniques. Social networks come in handy to solve crises as managers can use the platform to clarify the situation on time. This media is important because information spreads far and wide quickly (Scott, 2013). For instance, recently, Toyota recalled some of their car models due to defects in gas pedals, and it is through their Twitter handle it was able to respond to their customers’ questions.
My organization is an online gaming company that offers a variety of sports betting options for its users. It uses social media extensively to pass information and hear out customer complaints regarding deposits and other bet transactions. Facebook and Twitter are the main social sites we use to reach out to our customers, and it is an advantage to the organization since more than 80% of the customers like or follow the Facebook and Twitter pages. These two media are very efficient in crisis management especially in those situations when our main website experiences an outage.
As much as social media is important in crisis situations, we can’t disregard that it is associated with drawbacks, as well. These media are often associated with cybercrime such as hacking that leads to identity theft (Qualman, 2009). Hacking leads to hackers or cyber criminals spreading undesired messages in the name of real owners of the accounts. Either, social sites are common places for defamation of individuals or organizations leading to loss of reputation. Still, organizations that engage social media may fail to give feedback to customers leading to damage of reputation.
References
Qualman, E. (2009). Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Scott, D. M. (2013). The new rules of marketing & PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly.