Watch Your Step with Social Media

Jonathan Bernstein crisis communications, crisis management, Crisis Prevention, Crisis Response, PR, public relations, reputation management Leave a Comment

Get prepared before trouble finds you

As social media becomes more and more prevalent in our lives, so too do social media based crises. Just looking at the pages of this blog you’ll find story after story of runaway Twitter posts and customer-alienating Facebook gaffes. How, then, does the novice social media user stay out of trouble? In a Globe and Mail article, business expert Tony Wilson gave four tips to avoid your own crisis situation:

  1. It’s not just teenagers who damage their reputations using social media. If you’re in business, the legal profession or any other sector in which confidentiality is of the utmost importance, what you say online can be used by your competitors or others to the detriment of your company and your career. “Should I be tweeting at all?” has to be the first question you ask yourself.

  2. The damage can be done without you realizing it. Even the most harmless comments within something as mundane as a job description or a status update can reveal to others whose job it is to keep an eye on you, a new process or technology. So if you’re in high-tech, be careful what you say about what you do, especially on LinkedIn.

  3. It’s important to have social media policies in place within your organization so that all employees, from the CEO down, are conscious of the blunders they can make by even the most innocuous updates or posts. Employees should be made aware that breach of these policies will have serious consequences, including the possibility of dismissal. These policies can and should be incorporated within employment agreements.

  4. Someone within the organization should be tasked with regularly educating employees from the CEO down on the hazards of social media use, including updates on the horror stories that are reported in the media every day. 

What most of these boil down to is a prime tenet of crisis management: preparedness is key. If everyone involved is properly trained, educated, and aware, the risk of trouble falls dramatically.

The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com/

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