subject: Social Media - Public Saviour Or Troublemaker? [print this page] A piece in PR Week this week considered how social media is increasingly being used by corporate firms in order to mend their damaged reputations in crisis situations. No doubt given the immediacy of the medium, the PR world is increasingly using social media to defuse crises.
However, on the flip side of the argument, PR execs also blamed social media for causing reputational crises in the first place. 'More than 70% of agencies blamed social media as the main cause of igniting communications crises for clients, whilst 24% said traditional media ignited crisis situations.
Bloggers attracted the most blame for igniting crises (34%), followed by social networking sites (24%) and forums (8%). Half of all PR agencies (51%) had a client that had experienced a crisis management situation involving social media in the past 12 months. Some 61 per cent said the use of social media had exacerbated the story, while 45 per cent said it gave journalists easy access to disgruntled people.'
It's a fair point that social media with and its immediate effects can cause and indeed fuel a crisis situation for any firm. Which is no doubt down to the medium's honesty (given that it's largely uncensored) and immediacy. It's probably also true that consumers are far more likely to comment online in response to a negative rather than positive experience that they've had. (Who rants about a positive experience?) Indeed, positive posts are largely met with scrutiny given that the chances are they were written by the firm in question under an alias.
But the biggest mistake for any firm would be to ignore it. Social media is here and it is growing. The smartest thing that companies can do is get to grips with and use it to the own advantage. Better that firm is seen to be responding and acting to negative customer comments rather than simply ignoring them. Indeed, presence and a positive proactive response via blogs and networking sites is arguably better than no mention at all.
According to the piece, experts disagree over the extent to which companies have gotten to grips with the medium. Regester Larkin MD Andrew Griffin was quoted as having said: 'Social media have really taken off in crisis management in recent months. Almost all the projects we are working on have some sort of social media element to them, primarily because it is so useful a tool for campaigners and so hard a tool for corporates to get right.'
Porter Novelli, head of crisis at Neil Bayley said: 'Proactively assessing readiness for a digital media crisis is still something many companies have not embraced. We are starting to see them build elements of digital media into crisis simulation exercises and process development, but rarely do they test response capabilities.'
