Social Media And Its Effects On Society

Social media has become an essential channel for corporations to build a two-way relationship with their customers. However, having a social media account cannot solve everything. To make the best use of social media in keeping a positive relationship with their customers, corporations ought to seek and maintain influence among their followers in social media, and participate in communications with them.

Social media can be beneficial to organizations as in advertising, or harmful as when there is a crisis situation facing the organization. Social media forced crisis management to modify it approaches due to the speed with which information can spread. So, how should organizations tackle crisis situations? The crisis management team can follow the following steps.

Social media empowers consumers to voice concerns and put businesses to the test. As a business owner, you will understand that you want your customers to have the best possible experience. You will also understand that sometimes things go wrong and your customer will be dissatisfied… Using social media gives you the power to ensure your customer is happy whilst advertising your excellent customer service. Customers can contact you both publicly and privately about their concerns, giving you the chance to resolve them. Resolving issues via social media is much simpler than the often confusing email system. Customers are aware of how to structure their complaints as it comes natural in the modern generation and find that their complaints are resolved faster and easier due to the more informal

We cannot deny how big of an impact social media has on our lives now, not only on people but businesses too. It has opened a whole new door to the business world and given them a big opportunity to interact and attract a larger amount of customers. It’s given us a new and faster way of communication by exchanging pictures, stories, news, blogs, online discussions, etc. In exchange businesses have benefited by a long shot just by the click of a button. With the help of the Internet a company no longer is dependent on a particular customer base to survive because now it can reach out to a worldwide audience within seconds. It’s imaginable the countless business attributes of all social media to this day and still is growing. Social media

Even though the original intention and many conservative business people still see social media as only intended for connecting friends, it has grown to be an important tool in management of both business and customer information as well as a marketing tool. As a result, social media has been one of the best business innovations in transforming the way business is transacted. Regardless of the conservative lot mentioned above, majority of business leaders have taken up social media as a tool in management of employees, marketing and communication.

Social media is capable of connecting a brand with its consumers and discover how they are being perceived, it also has the power to change perceptions and identify the key people within the business network. The unique feature of social media is that it can provide corporations and businesses solutions developed through operating with consumers and stakeholders. Basically, social media serves as a visible connection to one’s corporation and its stakeholders, consumers, suppliers, etc, who each have a defined role within the system to filter and regulate information. As mentioned earlier, the influence of social media is spreading in a proliferative pace that has resulted to an essential transformation in society, technology and business customs.

Social Media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube are web-based activities that provide individuals access to build a public or a semi-public profile within a confined system, connect and find users that they share a connection with as well as view and navigate the list of connections that are made by other participants of the systems (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Social media is widely used by young adults contributing to about 84% of the total usage (Smith, 2011). Some of the popular reasons for widespread use of social media are staying in touch with near and dear ones especially with friends and family, making new friends, following famous politicians and celebrities and also in search of potential relationships (Smith, 2011). However as the use of social media becomes more widespread, we cannot help but express concerns over the effects that social media usage may have on our behavior. Over the past couple of decades, research has strongly linked social media usage with negative behavioral outcomes and is known to affect one’s overall well-being. This essay will begin by discussing some of the behavioral issues that result from social media usage, followed by criticisms of this argument. The recommendation will then highlight some ways by which the behavioural problems could be dealt with, acknowledging that self-monitoring and self-regulation are the main ways to tackle the issue.

Social media has transformed the crisis communication arena, an imperfect science, the use of social media as a crisis response strategy has proved to be effective means of reputation management for some institutions, and ineffective for others. As social media’s influence is found within Samsung’s crisis scholars Mina Roshan, Matthew Warren, and Rodney Carr in Understanding the use of social media by organizations for crisis will assist in providing the context of social media as unpredictable crisis management tool, and will help to assess social media response practiced by Samsung and the influence these communication channel had on exacerbating their crisis. Over the course of my research two questions I will seek to answer are: How has social media influenced how organizations respond in crisis situations? What does Samsung’s ineffective application of Benoit and Coomb’s crisis practices reveal of the nature of reputation management in today’s world? Ultimately, this research project will expand the breadth of crisis communication, and showcase the importance of communication messages in crisis situations in the digital world.

The emergence of social media has not only transformed modern communications but it has also provided new, unique, and powerful opportunities for organizations to communicate. Most of these organizations and companies have used social media as a platform to promote their businesses through communicating with new, current, and potential clients and/or customers. As a result, social media is gradually developing as an important part of organizational strategy and marketing. However, since social media is relatively a novel discovery, there are several mistakes associated with it that are bound to occur. In most cases, social media postings are permanent and can become viral in a short period of time i.e. few days. Therefore, organizations need to carefully manage their communications in order to deal with the potentially damaging viral social media blunders.

Regarding using social media for crisis communication, the unstable business environment created by a crisis may blur the boundary between internal and external stakeholders (Lerbinger, 1997). These groups may both be affected by a crisis and become intertwined. However, as indicated in the previous section, this present study is concerned more with the external than internal stakeholders. The author believes that external stakeholders do not have much access to a company’s information, and that therefore they could have an even greater craving for information than their internal counterparts. The external stakeholders that this study looks at are the customers and general audience, and during crises, victims and their associates. Victims may be customers of an organization before a crisis happens, and they become victims once they are harmed or affected. Combined with Mitchell et al.’s (1997) categories, since the main driving force of a crisis is urgency,

In recent years, the world has changed by modern technological developments. People in these days are living real revolution and changes that affect in somehow their life. Social media has contributed to link parts of this wide world to each other, and paved the way for all people exchange views and ideas. In addition, social media sites are considered the most widespread on the Internet because of its characteristics that made it different from other websites. Because of social media, people has become living in small town. They do not need to travel in order to getting informations or news. Social media has created easier way to achieve communication between individuals and groups.Social media websites, such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace , High Five, Tagged and YouTube have allowed people to exchange video clips, photos, share files and perform immediate talks and direct communication and interaction between the audience. Despite of advantages of social media that offer to its users, there are some disadvantages that may overcome those advantages. There are a lot of severe criticisms that social media faced because of its negative impact on individuals, families and society. Steal information, break the personal privacy, wasting a lot of time and isolation from people are some of problems that people have faced because of social media. People have divided into two group toward this issue. Some people think that social media has contributed to make their life better.

A lot of research has been done over the last few years to prophesize social media as a new form of customer-centric relationship building. Building a network or using social media to deepen customer intimacy has become the norm of today. However, what is often overlooked is the impact of social media to change behaviors, and the potential to use social media to impact a professional’s decision-making processes. This article discusses the effects social media has on business, its advantages and disadvantages. Social media can affect business’s marketing, communications, reviews, transactions, day to day operations, and other business

Social media's influence is accelerating across every aspect of society, bringing with it a need for increased authenticity, transparency and trust. For the first time customers can stand on equal ground with the brands they buy from and in some cases, are very loyal to. Of the most disruptive force in society today, social networks are revolutionizing how the consumer interacts with every strata of business and government as well, from the small business to the global enterprises, from city hall to The White House (Bernoff, Schadler, 2010). This new platform of social media gives customers, and in the case of governments, citizens, the opportunity to voice their opinions, good and bad, very loudly and often get global attention from their efforts to change societies (Ang, 2011). The Arab Spring of 2010 forever changed how political change will take place in a country. That series of political events, all broadcast in real time over social media, solidified the value and immediacy of social media as an instrument of change. Social media as the foundation of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems has progressed rapidly form the initial integrations completed by Salesforce.com and others, to where Social CRM (SCRM) is a category unto itself in enterprise software (Greenberg, 2010).

According to Campbell in order to achieve key business strategies and goals, social media and innovation have to be closely tied to (Campbell, 2010). Organization has to first identify which social media outpost source to establish their presence, it can be done through company blog, Facebook or Twitter. Presence must be constantly monitored and monitoring can be done using team approach whereby a team of employees are settled to be responsible in managing the account. Through social media, organization is able to monitor the voices of customers’ view as well as track competitors’ current new update efficiently in order to stay abreast and encourage creatively thinking in the organization, as well as advising for your new product with just a simple tweet or post. In Appendix 1 and 2 are some examples of how a multinational organization named Baskin-Robbins uses Facebook and Twitter monitoring to get views and communicate using two way communications with their customers.

However, survey (2b) shows that the respondents aged 25 and above have similar perceptions about social media to those of younger age groups. Respondents aged 35 or above favored this communication platform even more than the younger participants. The survey results indicated that older stakeholders perceive social media as a credible, quick and convenient information channel. If a crisis starts on social media, they would expect organizations to respond on the same social media channel, as they think crisis response on social media shows that an organization is caring. Further, the respondents aged 35 or above agreed that they would stop criticizing or sharing bad news about an organization which responds on social media. They would also be more likely to support such an organization after a crisis.