Crisis Situations & Ethics for Businesses

Social media has become a valuable business tool to connect with customers, promote your brand, and expand your online marketing voice. It can even be fun! According to the Pew Research Center, only 32% of employees say their employers have no rules about presenting themselves on the internet. This means that two-thirds of companies don’t have guidelines or strategies in place to deal with social media use. And if an issue arises, it can be challenging for them to know how to handle it.

A social media policy is put in place by an employer and a social media team to provide guidelines for how the organization and its employees should handle social media use. To avoid a social media crisis, keep these fundamentals in mind while creating content:

Stay away from Biases: Stay away from the controversial, adverse political, religious, ethnic, and cultural biases. Businesses and marketers need to avoid (negative) political, religious, ethnic, or cultural discrimination landmines that could be termed as controversial, which could be detrimental to the brand, depending on what side of the culture the business supports.

Know your audience: Knowing your audience is critical to understand which content topics and formats are attractive to your audience. This will help you refine your target audience and also facilitate in developing an anti-spam mechanism. Also, it will allow you to segment the audience and send over relevant messages that will drive engagement.

Never Compromise on Privacy: If you are doing some marketing via social media, make sure you do not violate privacy rules. Ensure you are not violating any NDA clauses or anything you don’t want to be divulged about your company or your brand.

Be Transparent and Speak Truth: If you are endorsing a product, idea, or personality, you need to disclose why you support it (Akbar, 2016). Another important element here is to be true to yourself as well as the audience. For example, if a company sent you a product for a review on their site, make sure that it is said in the caption. The audience has a right to know. This is something that celebrities do on their social media platforms for companies and products in exchange for money or exposure.

Think Before You Post: Thinking before you post on social media is very important because it is never really deleted once something is posted. Your post is going out to the masses in a matter of seconds, and it might be deleted from your platforms, but it is never deleted from the internet. One option to think about is the T.H.I.N.K method.

When you T.H.I.N.K. before you post on social media, you’ll not only avoid conflicts and problems, but you’ll also establish a stellar digital footprint that will create more opportunities for you when applying for college and employment.

Respond to Comments Professionally: Interacting with your audience through social comments is an effective way to connect with your target market. By providing excellent customer service through social mentions, you retain existing customers and win new ones. Having a solid customer service team is vital to interact with comments and reviews. According to HelpScot, “When building a support department, you need to decide on the specifics of service quality you will provide and include your entire team in crafting that definition. Once you have defined what “great service” is for your company, you have a standard against which to measure your support team.”

List credentials: Informational posting about certificates is desired to show that there is certainty in the conversation. Such as a resume for oneself, lists credentials that support experiences and traits that one is good at performance. A business needs to create a similar resume.

In conclusion, a company needs to have a social media crisis plan with a strong set of guidelines to whatever crisis might arise from politics, religion, negative feedback to a post you didn’t mean to put out there. In today’s world of social media, the internet, cameras, and all of those tools in the palm of your hand, it is not that easy to it “just go away.” So once again, think before you post.

Akbar, T. (2016, June 14). 7 Fundamental Ethics of Social Media Marketing. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://www.business2community.com/social-media/7-fundamental-ethics-social-media-marketing-01571504

James, S. (n.d.). Social media Ethics: Why you should have a policy. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://www.streamcreative.com/blog/bid/52570/social-media-ethics-why-you-should-have-a-policy

Pilakowski, M. (2015, October 18). T.h.i.n.k. before you post. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://technologypursuit.edublogs.org/2015/10/18/t-h-i-n-k-before-you-post/

Scout, H. (2021, February 25). Help scout. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://www.helpscout.com/helpu/customer-support-department/