MGT502 - Business Communication: Social Media Strategy at McDonald's

This report explores the use of social media in workplace communication, focusing on McDonald's as a case study. It begins with an introduction to social media and its importance in business communication, supported by research and evidence. The report discusses the benefits of social media for internal communication, knowledge sharing, and decision-making within organizations. It also addresses potential issues and challenges associated with social media use in the workplace. The report further implements a social media strategy within McDonald's, examining the company's use of various social media platforms and the impact on employee engagement and customer relations. Finally, the report provides recommendations for optimizing social media usage to enhance communication and mitigate potential drawbacks. Desklib provides a platform to access this and similar assignments.

Running Head: BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 0
BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 1
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Background................................................................................................................................3
Context of the organisation........................................................................................................3
Proposal......................................................................................................................................4
References..................................................................................................................................5

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 2
Introduction
The proposal is a document that covers the area of research that need to be done on the topic.
This proposal includes the outline of the report and its objective. The main motive of the
proposal is to present a picture of the whole scenario in small part so that reader can get the
brief idea of the report. There are different issues faced by the researcher during the research
in terms of resource and cost. The research is based on the assumption that cost and resource
will be put to minimum. The proposal serves as a draft for completing the whole report. The
report further will present the social media usage in the workplace for communication
purpose. For implementing the social media strategy, McDonald’s is a chosen organisation.
Further, in the proposal of the report, social media importance and its issues in workplace
will be discussed in concise form so that its usage and issues can be understood properly. The
proposal contains some useful information about the report. It contains some essential key
points regarding the social media and its importance in the workplace. Later on, the proposal
will explain the social media strategy in the chosen organisation that will increase the
understanding of reader regarding the social media communication tool.
Background
Background includes the general information regarding the topic so that reader gets the
information regarding the topic that will be discussed later on. The evidences that are
gathered provide a useful understanding on the role of social media in the business
communication. The information collected through evidence states that social media now a
days becomes one of the important tool to for communicating in the workplace (Cardon and
Marshall, 2015). Using social media, business organisation can contact with various
departments as well as employees. It serves as quick transfer of information. In the words of
(Dong et al, 2017), sharing of ideas and knowledge become an important part of organisation
for team development. Therefore, digital communication becomes essential for time-to-time
sharing of knowledge. From the evidences, it is founded that after the use of social media in
the businesses, customer demand as well as expectations has changed. Besides it, social
media tools prove to be effective in order to maintain the flow of communication in the
organisation (Perrin, 2015). The evidences gathered are helpful in knowing the social media
concept in various aspects. The benefits of social media in workplace are huge as it serves the
fast transfer of ideas, knowledge, and information (Stark, Gustafsson and Åman, 2018).

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 3
Companies use these sites so that quick and efficient decision can be taken by communicating
with employees. These evidences will apply in knowing the different types of social media
sites that firm uses in communicating at workplace. The evidences stated that technology has
become one of the important parts in order to share the knowledge within team members
(Colbert, Yee and George, 2016). Besides this Vernucio, (2014) stated that in the current
business environment, different approaches are used for communication with various brnads
by using social media. The research was done on journals, books, and websites. There
reliability has been checked by applying reliability tests.
Context of the organisation
The organisation chosen for implementing the social media strategy is McDonald’s. It is best
fast food industry founded in 1940. It is world’s best restaurants through its major market
share and customer base. It made effective use of social media in communicating better at
workplace. It is serving over 69 million customers worldwide in almost 100 countries. Due
to its presence worldwide, it has to communicate time-to-time regarding changing policies or
any rules and regulation in outside environment that affect the working at organisation
(McDonald’s, 2018). McDonald is using social media in effective way due to which it has
generated best pool of customers toward its brand. It uses various social media sites such as
twitter, Facebook and Google. By using these websites, employees get to know regarding
important news. Besides using the social media sites for interaction with employees, it uses
social media tools so that communication can done in less time at workplace and better
decision can be taken fast (Perrin, 2015). By using these social media sites at workplace,
employees get motivated that they too are given importance by communicating with them
regarding any important news or at the time of any issue. Besides providing the benefits in
the organisation, it also result in some issues sometime that need to be address in the
organisation for better communication (Zarrella, 2009). In order to address these issues, a
recommendation is provided so that the effective use of social media can be made and
barriers can be removed totally.
Proposal
The report is divided into various sections so that reader can come to know about social
media and its importance in workplace in various ways. The report begins with the
introduction part in which the meaning of social media has been discussed. In this part, the

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 4
evidences regarding the different aspects of social media are taken into account that helped in
completing this task. Social media is a useful technique to communicating effectively at the
workplace. Besides this, the useful information and knowledge regarding the social media
concept will be described here. The different viewpoint of authors is presented here. Further
discussion will be done on the importance of social media in 21st century business
communication. In this section of the report, the importance of social media techniques in
small as large business organisations is highlighted. The evidence gathered helped in
knowing that the hindrances in traditional use of communication techniques has been
removed with the help of updates social media tools. At the end of the report, social media
strategy has been implemented in the chosen organisation McDonald’s. This section covers
the use of different social media sites in the food industry. It also displays the issues that it
sometimes faces from the social media sites on the workplace. From the deep research of the
evidences, it is founded that continuous communication through social media also puts
negative impact on the employees. In order to remove the issues that social media cause,
several recommendations are provided, so that best use of this technique can be made and
potential results can be come.

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 5
References
Cardon, P.W. & Marshall, B. (2015) The hype and reality of social media use for work
collaboration and team communication. International Journal of Business
Communication, 52(3), pp.273-293.
Carroll, C.E. (2015) The handbook of communication and corporate reputation (Vol. 49).
United States: John Wiley & Sons.
Colbert, A., Yee, N. & George, G. (2016) The digital workforce and the workplace of the
future.
Dong, Y., Bartol, K.M., Zhang, Z.X. & Li, C. (2017) Enhancing employee creativity via
individual skill development and team knowledge sharing: Influences of dual‐focused
transformational leadership. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 38(3), pp.439-458.
McDonald’s. (2018) history of McDonald’s. [online] Available from:
https://www.mcdonalds.com.ph/content/page/about [accessed 11|08|18].
Perrin, A. (2015) Social media usage. Pew research center, pp.52-68.
Stark Nässlin, R., Gustafsson, E. & Åman, A. (2018) Digital Internal Communication: An
investigation of digital communication tools used within three organizations and employees'
attitudes towards these tools.
Underwood, M.A. (2017) Intranet Exploitation of Social Network Knowledge Intelligence.
In Harnessing Social Media as a Knowledge Management Tool (pp. 273-298). IGI Global.
Vernuccio, M. (2014) Communicating corporate brands through social media: An exploratory
study. International Journal of Business Communication, 51(3), pp.211-233
Zarrella, D. (2009) The social media marketing book. California: O'Reilly Media, Inc.