It is now commonplace, even expected, that businesses have corporate blogs, LinkedIn and FaceBook pages and Twitter accounts. The thing that can lead to crises is the fact that many of these businesses do not take care to ensure that the sought-after connection is being made between them and the consumer, rather than the individuals in charge of their social media accounts. An article from SearchEngineWatch.com elaborates on how this can land you in trouble:
Social media offers a lot in the way of “personal branding.” Sometimes it happens accidentally. Your audience becomes attached to one of your employees, the employee leaves your company, and those audience members follow.
Employees accidentally create their own personal brand when the audience attaches to them as a person, rather than as the representative of a company. They view the employee telling the audience about the valuable content as the authority, rather than the company that invested in putting out the valuable content.
If you do not take precautions and include possibilities like this in your crisis management planning, something as simple as replacing whoever handles your Twitter responses could cost you much of your audience, or worse, redirect them to your competition!
The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/