At the time, social media felt like a wonderful idea.
A way for people with common interests all over the world to connect.
A way for people to share their news.
A way for people to reconnect with long lost friends and family
And sure, much of this happens and there are countless wonderful amazing stories about social media, but unfortunately there are just as many upsetting and horrific ones.
Showcasing the worst in humanity – the toxicity, the trolling and catfishing.
This is why we can’t have anything nice.
From an online reputation management perspective, social media has massive implications
The first is the myriad of ways in which a person can self-sabotage their own reputation by writing something offensive, inflammatory and provocative. Usually it’s on twitter and there are so many examples of it over the years. To remind you of just some of the celebrities over the years who’ve found themselves foul of a twitter storm are James Gunn,JK Rowling , Chrissy Teigen, Vanessa Hudgens, and Iggy Azalea.
The second is the ability of other people to post something about you. Via social media anyone has the ability to post about their horrific experience on this airline or at that restaurant. They can start by posting about it on Facebook and Instagram, follow it with a tweet and then finish up by uploading a video to YouTube about where they discuss it.
If this goes viral and there are newspaper articles about it, it’s a reputational nightmare and a full-on crisis.
If people who don’t know about your brand see this, it’s going to be hard for them to believe anything to the contrary. It’s going to be hard for them to put any sort of trust in you.
But social media isn’t all doom and gloom. It also provides opportunity.
If you’re an airline that offers a great service or a restaurant that provides a great product and people are posting about it, these word of mouth endorsements are worth their weight in gold.
And then when someone googles you, not only does your own social media paint quite the picture, but those of other people does so as well.
With bots, AI, Fake News and photoshop, we need to take more grains of salt when looking at social media.
If you have anything to do with management of your brand, you want to make sure there’s a sturdy and robust social media strategy in place. Those clicking publish need to know exactly what they’re doing and they need to be on top of what other people are saying about your brand.