Week 12 - Community Relations

Customer Relations and Social Media - Reflections from the Readings and Videos

The advent of social media and the internet has been transformational in how quickly information can be spread and accessed. This can have both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side, companies can reach farther and wider much more quickly and much more cost effectively than ever before. People can connect in a way that transcends geographical boundaries like never before, and support one another and create virtual communities for common causes. On the negative side, bad press (either justified or not) can spread much more quickly than a company may have time to respond, and also adding in the factor that it is impossible to control. Social media can be much more anonymous as well, which makes it very difficult to pursue legal remedies for misinformation.

And there is no limit to the amount of misinformation that gets published. Any person or group with an agenda can propagate whatever message they wish, and we see this play out in the bitter vitriol ever present in political campaigns. Another example is that Medical websites and wikis are not always accurate. This has resulted in the increase of technologically savvy public relations teams present in various organizations, which has now become a necessary tool to conduct business. Constant monitoring of the “buzz”, contingency plans on response to negative press will be the new norm. Privacy issues will need to be addressed, as the lines between work and play get more blurred in the online reality. Clear policies need to be established and communicated to employees on what is expected both at work and at home regarding what is published online.

At my company, we have embraced social media and internet technologies to promote the company vision, mission and values, as well as our product launches and services. I believe we have been especially effective in using social media to enhance our recruitment activities, reaching out to a younger generation of potential employees who have increasingly embraced new technology as a given. We have websites to process and advertise candidate applications, groups established on LinkedIn, Facebook pages, and Twitter feeds. In my role in the UK, we are using social media to market our upcoming launch of Euro6 engines: http://cumminseuro6.com/ . Our press release included all our marketing materials on a clever credit card sized USB flash drives with the logos emblazoned on them, including links to all of the social media regarding the products.

While I believe the social media formats will continue to establish as the dominant form of communication moving forward in the near future, I don’t believe this necessarily means it will fully replace more traditional formats. People are not online 24/7, they still watch television and drive by billboards, and do other things besides sit in front of the laptop or play with the Smartphone. The mail service is not going away anytime soon, as there is still a significant portion of the population who do not have access to online media. Although I would look forward to the day when I receive much less junkmail in the post! Although I will most likely not be around when this day comes, I do worry about the loss of significant pieces of our history which exists only in the virtual format – if we ever do run out of cost effective energy, it will be difficult for anything not in actual print to survive the ages.