According to a study titled Epicenters of Social Media
Crises by Christian Faller, most of the social media crises in 2011 originated
from Twitter and the author studied 30 social media crises in 2011, out of
which 16 of the crises (53%) originated from twitter followed by Facebook
(17%), Blogs (13%), YouTube (7%) and other platforms (10%). Most of the crisis
are triggered by organization’s customers (54%) followed by organizations
themselves (34%) and rest by opposing stakeholders (13%). Organizations customers complain about
negative customer experiences (28.6%) followed by violations of ethical
guidelines through the organization itself or its employees (25%),
inappropriate content (10.7%), rogue employees (10.7%), failure to respond
quickly (7.1%), violation of legal guidelines (3.6%), security breach (3.6%),
inappropriate response(3.6%), community censorship(3.6%), lack of fact checking(3.6%)
are the top causes of social media crises. As is evident in the study Twitter is the
favorite platform for customers to vent their anger or negative feedback and
the reason for this seems to be brevity of information as Twitter allows only
140 characters per update, users can exchange many different updates in a
relatively short amount of time and information spreads much faster than on
other channels which users can easily understand. Since many twitter users
often forward messages even without reading them and the culture of sharing and
forwarding messages as part of the social media culture which also leads to
rise in self esteem as spreading message will obviously lead to increased
reputation among the circle and the density of influencers and opinion leaders
is very high on Twitter and they can easily share information through micro
blogging in short messages. There has been a sudden spurt in twitter traffic
for the particular company during the social media crisis that highlights the
significance.
The study highlighted the fact that Twitter is a major
epicenter for social media crises and businesses should have a proper strategy
for managing their presence on the twitter. There should be a social media
crisis tackling plan with a particular focus on twitter, businesses should be
very careful in identifying and engaging the key influencers and opinion leaders
that are dominating, regular communication with the twitter users and for this businesses
should give the responsibility of managing the communication to specialist
teams who not only engage with customers but also manage the content in terms
of videos, photos, website links, etc, engage specialists if necessary for
developing the content that engages the users. Businesses should be responding
in a proper manner to customer’s positive and negative feedback. Particularly
in case of negative feedback and social media crisis appropriate response
should be given with a focus to lighten the mood, if necessary apology has to
be tendered and make amends to the customers. Businesses should make sure that
the crisis is properly handled by the responsible people and necessary steps
need to be taken so that this will not be repeated in future. Not only is it
difficult to build a presence on twitter but also it is equally difficult to
maintain the presence on twitter and any negligence in maintaining the twitter
presence will have a direct impact on the brand and company reputation.
Christian Faller study highlights the major social media crises in 2011 and how
companies have faltered. For maintaining the twitter presence businesses should
train the employees and if necessary engage the specialist from the relevant
agencies to develop and maintain the relevant Twitter strategy for the
business.
Thanks for sharing this post!
ReplyDeleteThat was extremely informative
Melbourne SEO Services