Analyzing Social Media Communication: Case Studies and Recommendations

This report examines the critical role of social media in professional communication, focusing on its impact on stakeholder engagement and brand reputation. It highlights the speed and reach of social media while emphasizing the importance of accurate and reliable information. The report provides real-world examples of both successful and unsuccessful social media campaigns, illustrating how companies can benefit from positive engagement and suffer from inaccurate or inappropriate content. It analyzes cases like London Luton Airport and Tesco, demonstrating the consequences of poor communication. Conversely, it showcases positive examples such as Pampers and JetBlue. The report concludes with recommendations for businesses to manage their social media presence effectively, including the need for a dedicated social media team and rigorous content checks to ensure positive communication. The report stresses the need for companies to use social media cautiously and responsibly to foster positive relationships with stakeholders.

Communication
in
Professional Contexts

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Executive Summary
Social media is a powerful tool that helps the company to interact with their stakeholders.
The biggest advantage of it is that news or any message spreads on it like a wildfire. This
report will illustrate different aspects about the use of social media by the company when it
comes to using it for communicating with the companies. Various real world examples have
been provided in the report to show that how the appropriate or inappropriate use of social
media can be beneficial or dangerous for the company respectively. Sharing inaccurate or
unreliable information to the customers can make them in fury and this can have long term
impact on the relationship of the company and its stakeholders. In the last section of this
report some recommendation has been provided about the things that must be managed by the
company while using social media for their open communication.

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Content
s
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................2
Importance of communicating with world with an accurate and reliable information...........................2
Negative example of how social media activity created problems for the company..............................3
Positive examples when companies got benefitted due to positive social media activity......................4
Recommendation...................................................................................................................................5
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................5
References.............................................................................................................................................6

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Introduction
Social media in today’s environment plays a very important role in the marketing done by
different organisations. Companies use social media as a platform to communicate with both
internal and external stakeholders. The major reason for selecting this platform is that there
are large numbers of people that are connected with it. It is not that just they are connected, it
is seen that they are highly active on these platforms. It gives the company an additional hand
to communicate directly with their target segment (Riddle, 2019). It is one of the best tools
for doing personalised marketing as well as for doing open communication with their
stakeholders. Some platforms such as Facebook have billions of users that help the company
to communicate with outside world. Every organisation is using multiple social media
platforms so as to reach to maximum numbers of people as possible. Another major reason
for the organisation to take use of social media for their campaign is that it is not costly and
provides a faster speed for connection. This helps the organisation to ensure that they spread
the news at much faster speed. The news on the social media spreads like a wildfire. This has
both positive and negative impact on the way communication is being done within the
organisation.
Importance of communicating with world with an accurate and reliable information
In the environment here even the smallest of mistakes by the company can give competitive
advantage to the rivals, it is crucial that the information that is shared by the company on the
social media platforms to make public must be reliable and accurate (Choo, 2013). There
have been incidences in past where companies have posted the wrong information public and
it has resulted in a negative manner for a company.
The first and most basic reason that makes it important for the organisation to share the
information that is accurate and reliable is that it creates the credibility of the organisation. It
is a connected world and everyone has an access to large numbers of data and they have
advanced technologies (Lee & Ma, 2012). If the company shares any false data or something
that is partially accurate, it is not easy for the company to hide it for the longer period of time.

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This puts company in a situation where they can lose their stakeholders especially the
consumers. This is truer in the case when the company is communicating their plans for the
future. This also plays a crucial role in the ethical management of the company. Giving
wrong or less reliable data can reduce the chances that any ethical concerns come in front of
the company. This creates a positive environment in front of the company (Crossfield, 2018).
If the company fails to communicate with the outside world, in a faithful environment then
there is sure chances that they might lose their control on the market.
If a company even by mistake shares the information for a while it gets spread to millions of
people at one click then companies have to make mitigation measures to do damage control.
There are communities on social media which if finds that the data shared by the company is
inaccurate a lot is said about the organisation. A very high negative environment gets created
against the company. It takes time and lot of money for the company to bring the situation in
control (Zillmann & Brosius, 2012). This is not beneficial in the environment where
economic constraints for the companies have increased. It is also seen that lie about the
company will fly all across the globe to reach in other parts of the world but the truth will
crawl to reach to everyone.
Negative example of how social media activity created problems for the company
For example, London Luton Airport in 2013 thought that it would be amusing that company
shares some fun with plane crashes. In this the company shared a photo that came from a
2005 incident in Chicago where a plane slid of the runway. This resulted in a death of 6 year
old boy. This was unreliable information for which company had to face criticism. Another
example in this regard was from the Ticket Broker StarHub. Someone shared an obscene
tweet from the firm’s account that showed that person was calling the company a
“stubsucking hell hole”. This message was live for about an hour when company actually
deleted it. They had to apologise for this vulgar tweets. This incident also showed that why it
was important for the companies to check its privacy and check its security settings (Costill,
2014).
The biggest example of how the negative tweets that they have made for communicating with
people a particular kind of message must be accurate and should not depict anything else was
of Tesco. In January 2013, company had to remove all its value burger from its shelves
because food investigators discovered that horse-meat was found in almost one-third of its

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burgers. Actually not one from the social media team of the company noticed that that they
posted a pre-scheduled tweet that included the phrase ‘hit the hay’. On the other hand
Habitat, a UK furniture and accessory retailer used a hashtag that was unreliable like #Apple
and #iPhone. It was totally irrelevant and generated some other leads (Austin, Fisher Liu &
Jin, 2012).
Slight inaccuracy can be dangerous for the company. This was seen in the case of Netflix
launching Qwikster. In this company used “@Qwikster” as their link to the company but
when the users clicked on that link, they were reaching to drug-using Twitter user when they
tried to follow @Qwikster. This person had nothing to do with Netflix, this gave people a
reason to hate the company. In 2012, Snickers had to pay various celebrities in the UK to
tweet photos of them enjoying its candy bars. The OFT launched an investigation into this
Twitter ads and found it illegal to show any ads without stating them (Hill & Alexander,
2017).
Giving reliable information on which people can show their faith. Showing something that
has no heads can be dangerous for the image both for their credibility and interest that people
show in the company from the next time. Company must always check their database so as to
ensure that they do upload anything that is not reliable and is based on the fake news. Many a
time it is seen that companies in a hurry to respond to something immediately upload the
context that might go wrong for the company. In the CSR activities sharing clear and reliable
information is highly essential (Downs & Adrian, 2012). Failing to do so can reduce the
chances of the company to carry-on with their CSR activities appropriately. For example
when a company designs its annual report, they must accurately mention the things they have
done for both society and their associated stakeholders.
Positive examples when companies got benefitted due to positive social media activity
It is not that only companies faced negative consequences on social media. Due to use of
accurate and reliable information they got benefitted too. The best example of it is the
example of Pampers who does its social media marketing appropriately without being its
product highly glamorous. Pampers understood that diaper change was a least expected
moments of being a parent, hence they focused on the part that is compelling i.e. the
indisputable love and emotions behind caring and holding their new born (Kasteler, 2016).
They always highlight the strong and different kind of affection among the parents and the

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new born. They focus on emotional appeal and this has been appreciated by the customers.
They have never spread any message that was inaccurate, unethical or unreliable. Apart from
this companies lie JetBlue has a different idea of using social media as a platform for
communication. They do not use it for doing rigorous promotions rather they focus on
customer service by having a look at the twitter feed (Curtis, Edwards, Fraser, Gudelsky,
Holmquist, Thornton & Sweetser, 2010). They give instant and accurate replies to their
customers which has made a positive impact on the building the brand reputation.
Recommendation
It is recommended that companies should always concentrate on using social media
positively. They must always look for the positive things that they can portray through their
social media message. Trying extra ordinary or using too much innovation always has a side
effect. It is essential that a company check thousand times before it uses any tool for
communicating with its customers (Bertot, Jaeger & Hansen, 2012). They must have a
dedicated social media team that should be highly active and careful in checking the activity
of their social media platform.
Conclusion
From the above based report it can be concluded that Social media is an excellent platform
where companies can promote their products. But when the company uses it for their
communication, they must see that they are using reliable and accurate information in their
communication so as to avoid any kind of challenges. There are several examples of how the
social media activities have created both positive and negative impact on the image of the
company. This also helps in building brand reputation and helps in managing healthy
relations with their stakeholders.

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References
Austin, L., Fisher Liu, B., & Jin, Y. (2012). How audiences seek out crisis information:
Exploring the social-mediated crisis communication model. Journal of Applied
Communication Research, 40(2), 188-207.
Bertot, J. C., Jaeger, P. T., & Hansen, D. (2012). The impact of polices on government social
media usage: Issues, challenges, and recommendations. Government information
quarterly, 29(1), 30-40.
Choo, C. W. (2013). Information culture and organizational effectiveness. International
Journal of Information Management, 33(5), 775-779.
Costill, A. 2014. 35 Examples of #SocialMedia Fails. Retrieved from:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/35-social-media-fails/95613/#close
Crossfield, J. 2018. What’s Accuracy Got to Do With Social Media. Retrieved from:
https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/05/accuracy-social-media/
Curtis, L., Edwards, C., Fraser, K. L., Gudelsky, S., Holmquist, J., Thornton, K., & Sweetser,
K. D. (2010). Adoption of social media for public relations by nonprofit
organizations. Public Relations Review, 36(1), 90-92.
Downs, C. W., & Adrian, A. D. (2012). Assessing organizational communication: Strategic
communication audits. Guilford Press.
Hill, N., & Alexander, J. (2017). The handbook of customer satisfaction and loyalty
measurement. Routledge.
Kasteler, J. 2016. 8 companies doing social media right and what marketers can learn from
them. Retrieved from: https://marketingland.com/8-companies-social-media-right-
marketers-can-learn-198228
Lee, C. S., & Ma, L. (2012). News sharing in social media: The effect of gratifications and
prior experience. Computers in human behavior, 28(2), 331-339.

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Riddle, J. 2019. All Too Easy: Spreading Information Through Social Media. Retrieved from:
https://ualr.edu/socialchange/2017/03/01/blog-riddle-social-media/
Zillmann, D., & Brosius, H. B. (2012). Exemplification in communication: The influence of
case reports on the perception of issues. Routledge.