social media’s pros and cons as a company’s communication strategy, writing homework help
social media’s pros and cons as a company’s communication strategy, writing homework help
Critique needed:
Introduction
Social media and the online presence of a company can greatly increase the availability and accessibility of information between the company, employees, stakeholders, and customers. Social media can increase the communication of new products, services, policies, and company activities, such as acquisitions, product releases, sponsored events, etc. Social media can greatly decrease the time information reaches those that may benefit from the information while providing the widest distribution available.
While increasing the availability of information and decreasing the time information reaches customers, social media use policies must be created, maintained, and updated regularly to decrease the chance of misuse by disgruntled or improperly trained employees. Improper use of social media can bring unnecessary and potentially devastating consequences to a company. Loss of sensitive or proprietary information, embarrassing, compromising, or slanderous messages released, among others, are all issues that could arise while using social media. The key to social media use is to increase efficiency; however, care must be taken with regards to employee training, acceptable use policies, and proper oversight and compliance. Without proper policies and oversight, social media can become a public relations or legal nightmare for a company.
Analysis
Creating strong, all-encompassing acceptable use and oversight policies is the key to having a successful social media presence. Each field office within the company has unique products, services, and responsibilities that require unique uses of social media to be effective. However, it is imperative that the company enacts policies and procedures that standardize the basic requirements each field office must adhere to before establishing a social media presence.
Ensuring that the information provided on social media is useful to employees, stakeholders, and customers is imperative. Useless or misleading information can reflect the company badly amongst the consumers of the information. Ensure each post identifies the author and their position within the company. This allows customers and the company to identify where the information is coming from. Ensure that each account has multiple administrators that have full access to the account to ensure that improper posts may be contained or amended quickly and effectively. These are basic policies that may be included in a complete social media policy and may increase the effectiveness of a social media presence and limit damaging misuse. (IBM)
Summary
With strong policies for how social media is used within the company can greatly increase the effectiveness of information release to the widest distribution of consumers possible. Limiting the misuse of social media can be accomplished using a strong set of acceptable use and oversight policies.
References
IBM. (n.d.). IBM social computing guidelines. Retrieved from IBM: http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html