This week's reading was good. Particularly the article "Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media." The article discusses the framework a business should use, they frame these items as building blocks, in order to successfully develop strategies to aid in understanding, responding and monitoring different social media activities. Of course, reading this article as a company or even an individual you feel empowered to not only apply these strategies to help empower your business, but you also feel as though the steps are so simple that a caveman can do it. So I asked myself, why aren't all business taking these steps to create a website so a customer can browse products or having accounts across different social media platforms. Then it hit me...
Does social media help or hurt?
Before getting further into my argument I want to define what I mean by hurt. Hurt in this context is a company losing money or their reputation taking a hit. Recently my husband and I tried to order from a restaurant a friend of ours recommended. Of course, the first thing I did was look for the restaurant on Instagram and Twitter to see if a social media account exist. The answer was no! Before writing them off though I said to myself, maybe the owners are older so let me do a simple google search. What resulted was the business' information BUT they had no website. I personally find it archaic to allow customers to call in orders if they can't see the menu online. Especially for those who haven't eaten there before. How can I know what to call and order if there is no way for me to see what you serve? I decided to go into and ask why there isn't a website for the business and/or social media pages and one of the owners responded with, "we plated a to go box sloppily and the customer posted the picture online." What resulted, as you can imagine, is a rush of negative reviews on Google and their comments section on Instagram and Twitter. So they deactivated the social media pages. The new approach for this business is to dine-in or come in to place a to-go order. Their online option was never reintroduced because the owners never recovered from the backlash. On the other hand, the owners now double check the orders that are plated and boxed to go to ensure everything is up to their standards. In this personal example, I could argue that the business was hurt financially because they no longer offer and online ordering option, however, ensuring plating and boxing is up to standard is something that was improved, so in this sense it also helped them become better.
Since I had that personal example I went researching about how BIG brands were hurt by social media. You all can let me know if any of these sound familiar or if you were directly impacted:
Apple: remember when they were deliberately slowing the battery life in the older iPhones?
Amazon: Tried to get its headquarters in New York City, then the plans were nixed due to public outcry. However, this was not only on social media.
Facebook repeated privacy breaches
United Airlines broke the guitar of Canadian Singer Dave Caroll. Then he posted a video on Youtube that chronicles what transpired. The title of the video if you are wondering is "United Break Guitars." Which results in the company's stock plummeting 10% costing the stakeholders millions of dollars.
Also, there are plenty of restaurant who are boycotting social media, not because of them being intimidated by what has to be done to be successful, but because they are afraid of the backlash similar to my person example. For this reason, I understand why most companies are staying away. It literally takes one negative post to bring you down, quite possibly out of business depending on the magnitude of the audience that gets exposed to the negative post.
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