MNG81001: Analyzing Sunshine 100's Social Media Policy Case

This case study analyzes Sunshine 100's social media policy, examining the advantages and disadvantages of social media for organizations. It explores the potential impact of employee comments on brand reputation and outlines key elements that a company's social media policy should cover. The analysis emphasizes the importance of clear guidelines, risk management, and effective communication of the policy to employees. The case study also discusses how Sunshine 100's policy aims to manage legal problems, security risks, and consistency across communication channels, while also highlighting the importance of maintaining data security and privacy.

Management

To: Paul Morgan, CEO, Sunshine 100
From: Jane Wilson, Director of Social Media
Date: 14th January 2019
Subject: Sunshine 100’s social media policy
The increasing use of technology has changing the working culture of an organisation. The
mode of communication and working operations has changed due to the use of social media.
In this memo both the positive and negative consequences of social media are discussed. The
impact of social media is analysed and discussed.
Advantages and disadvantages
Social media offers various advantages as it help in reaching to large number of customers. It
also reduces marketing cost and increased sales. The traffic of the website also gets increased
due to advertisement of social media (Alalwan, Rana, Dwivedi and Algharabat, 2017). It
improves customer engagement by taking customer feedback so that opportunity and services
can be improved.
Some of the possible disadvantage social media is that there is no clear marketing strategy
that might reduce benefits for the business. It also requires immediate monitoring and
managing all the activities so that real benefits could be gained. The greater exposure of
services can increase the risk of cyber-attacks (Aichner and Jacob, 2015). The negative
feedback by some customers on social media can also degrade the brand image.
The major advantage gained by Sunshine 100 due to social media is brand awareness and
reputation that helped in grabbing customer’s attention. It is a cost effective approach as it is
a cheap way for advertising and promotion of activities (Panagiotopoulos, Shan, Barnett,

Regan and McConnon, 2015). It is also an easy way to evaluate and measure the website
traffic and to know about their interest of customers (Hamoud, Tarhini, Akour and Al-Salti,
2016). It also improves customer services by taking effective feedback so that improvement
can be done. Brand loyalty also gets improved.
Importance of social media policies in an organisation
Social media is very important for an organisation as the policies are used to get clear
guidance about the rules. Social media also protects the organisation from falling prey to
competitors and litigations. These policies help the employees to know what is acceptable at
the workplace and what is not (Roshan, Warren and Carr, 2016). It helps in improving
company’s reputation so that clear guidelines can be gained and information can’t be leaked.
The use of social media at the workplace also increases the chances of viruses and malware in
the system that creates consequences in leakage of information. It allows the company to
control their services from any location and reach to wider audience (Zheng and Yu, 2016).
It also reduces time by increasing the productivity by securing the data from unauthorised
access. . It also increases the risk by legal exposure of business.
Sunshine 100’s social media policy
The social media policy of sunshine 100 is used to set the expectations of employees by
allowing them to deal with the legal problems. Social media policy of sunshine 100’s is used
to defend against all the security risks. It also empowers employees to share the message of
company to more customers (Chadwick and Dennis, 2017). The social media policies were
used to create consistency across channels. The social media policy covers the ways in which
employees should maintain security by keeping the information confidential. The privacy
procedures were described so that customer information can remain secured. This helped in

creating secure passwords so that malicious attacks could be controlled (Brandtzaeg, Lüders,
Spangenberg, Rath-Wiggins and Følstad, 2016).
Communicating Sunshine media 100’s policy
Once the social media policies are designed it is important to communicate these policies
among employees so that everyone becomes aware about it (Brandtzaeg, Lüders,
Spangenberg, Rath-Wiggins and Følstad, 2016)s. Some of the steps through which social
media policies are communicated are listed below:
 Timing- The change in policy or introduction of new policy is introduced among
customers immediately.
 Audience- The members part of the organisation are the audience who follow the
social media policy
 Sender- The management team is responsible for sharing social media policy.
 Key Message- The message that is circulated is the impact of social media on an
organisation.
 Desired Outcome- The outcome of designing social media policy is reaching to wider
audience.
 Medium- It is communicated through the means of meeting, conference, emails or
memos (Alalwan, Rana, Dwivedi and Algharabat, 2017).
 Materials- The rules and regulations designed by the government and code of
conduct.
 Frequency- It is monitored and updated regularly.
Thus, it can be concluded that social media has become an important part for an organisation.
It helps in capturing large audience by offering services on large platform.

References
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Alalwan, A.A., Rana, N.P., Dwivedi, Y.K. and Algharabat, R., 2017. Social media in
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Brandtzaeg, P.B., Lüders, M., Spangenberg, J., Rath-Wiggins, L. and Følstad, A., 2016.
Emerging journalistic verification practices concerning social media. Journalism
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Chadwick, A. and Dennis, J., 2017. Social media, professional media and mobilisation in
contemporary Britain: Explaining the strengths and weaknesses of the Citizens’ Movement
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