Management Communication

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MANAGEMENT COMMUNICATION
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Date

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Management Communication
Introduction
Social media tools are important for any organization, for internal and external
communication purposes. Social media offers a decentralized platform where employees of an
organization can share ideas and relate efficiently. However, it has its own down sides when
misused. For example, Sunshine 100 Company made a big move to market its new program of
food and decided to utilize the social media to popularize it. The marketing phase was quickly
gaining traction and causing positive interest in a huge way. However, one slight mistake of one
of the employees completely changed the reputation that the social media tools had created for
the company. Therefore, it opened up a need to carry out a policy that will man the use of social
media in the organization.
Body
van Zoonen, Verhoeven and Vliegenthart, (2017) identifies the fact that the use of social media
for work-related purposes generates and induces boundary conflicts and interruptions. Going by
the findings above, it goes without saying that the boundary conflict as a result of using social
media clearly presented itself in Sunshine 100. When the staff member in the company posted
pictures with writings, “junk food, junk food everywhere!”, and posted the information to a
different private group, the employee crossed the boundary line and induced conflict with the
organization. Since the organization’s reputation was under jeopardy, the misuse of social media
by the employee also created interruptions in the company’s KidsEats campaign. The whole
program underwent an unprecedented disruptions for the purpose of sorting out the issue of the
negative comment posted by the employee. As compared with the traditional communication

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tools like communication through the word of mouth, the consequence of social media to cause
boundary conflict is the same. That is, the use of social media tools and the use of the traditional
communicartion channels like the word of mouth suffer the same fate of interruptions and
boundary conflict as pointed out by van Zoonen, Verhoeven and Vliegenthart, (2017). For
instance, an employee could relay inaccurate information with a defamatory nature to the
employees and to the general public. The only slight difference between social media and the
word of mouth is that social media is bound to affect a larger number of people than the word of
mouth.
Brooks, (2015) also appreciates the effect of the distraction-Conflict Theory in the use of social
media. In the appreciation of the theory, the model is broken into three steps; others are
distracting, distraction leads to attention conflict and the fact that attention conflict leads to
elevation of drive. The elevation drive consequently causes a situation of motor behavior on the
tasks that are complex and impaired performance. The employee who spent time to send the
controversial message about the junk food demonstrated the fact that the over usage of social
media had led to impaired judgment and poor attention to the extent of failing to predict the
detrimental effect of his action. Social media is more addictive than the traditional channels of
communication and because of that, it bears the effects postulated above.
Feldman et al., (2016) also appreciates the use of social influence to aid in risk
communication but goes ahead to offer a cautionary disclaimer that researchers have noted that
without clear strategies that are evidence-based on the use of these newer technologies, it has
become quite difficult to have an understanding of the best strategies to implement the use of
social media in the strategies of hazard planning.