Most of the social media crises originated on Twitter in 2011

1. Analysis & Outlook
Twitter origin of most of the Social Media Crises in 2011- How to handle
According to a study titled Epicenters of Social Media Crises by Christian Faller, most
of the social media crises in 2011 originated from Twitter and the author studied 30
social media crises in 2011, out of which 16 of the crises (53%) originated from twitter
followed by Facebook (17%), Blogs (13%), YouTube (7%) and other platforms (10%).
Most of the crisis are triggered by organization’s customers (54%) followed by
organizations themselves (34%) and rest by opposing stakeholders (13%).
Organizations customers complain about negative customer experiences (28.6%)
followed by violations of ethical guidelines through the organization itself or its
employees (25%), inappropriate content (10.7%), rogue employees (10.7%), failure to
respond quickly (7.1%), violation of legal guidelines (3.6%), security breach (3.6%),
inappropriate response(3.6%), community censorship(3.6%), lack of fact
checking(3.6%) are the top causes of social media crises. As is evident in the study
Twitter is the favorite platform for customers to vent their anger or negative feedback
and the reason for this seems to be brevity of information as Twitter allows only 140
characters per update, users can exchange many different updates in a relatively short
amount of time and information spreads much faster than on other channels which users
can easily understand. Since many twitter users often forward messages even without
reading them and the culture of sharing and forwarding messages as part of the social
media culture which also leads to rise in self esteem as spreading message will
obviously lead to increased reputation among the circle and the density of influencers
and opinion leaders is very high on Twitter and they can easily share information
through micro blogging in short messages. There has been a sudden spurt in twitter
traffic for the particular company during the social media crisis that highlights the
significance.
The study highlighted the fact that Twitter is a major epicenter for social media crises
and businesses should have a proper strategy for managing their presence on the twitter.
There should be a social media crisis tackling plan with a particular focus on twitter,
businesses should be very careful in identifying and engaging the key influencers and
opinion leaders that are dominating, regular communication with the twitter users and
for this businesses should give the responsibility of managing the communication to
specialist teams who not only engage with customers but also manage the content in
terms of videos, photos, website links, etc, engage specialists if necessary for
developing the content that engages the users. Businesses should be responding in a
proper manner to customer’s positive and negative feedback. Particularly in case of
negative feedback and social media crisis appropriate response should be given with a
focus to lighten the mood, if necessary apology has to be tendered and make amends to
the customers. Businesses should make sure that the crisis is properly handled by the
responsible people and necessary steps need to be taken so that this will not be repeated
in future. Not only is it difficult to build a presence on twitter but also it is equally
difficult to maintain the presence on twitter and any negligence in maintaining the
twitter presence will have a direct impact on the brand and company reputation.
Christian Faller study highlights the major social media crises in 2011 and how
companies have faltered. For maintaining the twitter presence businesses should train
the employees and if necessary engage the specialist from the relevant agencies to
develop and maintain the relevant Twitter strategy for the business.
Rajesh Prabhakar Analyst Bio @ http://socialmediacases.blogspot.com/