Potential dangers of social media to Business

 

Reputation management: One of the risks of using social media is that a company’s reputation could be at risk by creating negative publicity for example if a company makes an inappropriate remark or comment about another business on a social media platform the company can face legal action against them.

For example “Pepsi's Swedish branch released a set of Facebook ads featuring a voodoo doll of competitor Portugal's megastar Cristiano Ronaldo tied to train tracks, getting his head crushed in, and covered in pins. They were forced to quickly remove them and apologize after a Portuguese anti-Pepsi Facebook group formed and gained over 100K fans in a day”.

 

 

 

Security Issues: When you are online there is always the potential risk of hacking, spy-ware and bugs amongst others.  There is a risk that a customer’s personal data and confidential company information could be stolen and leaked outside the company. This is a huge risk for the company, from 25.05.2018 new data protection GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law is going into force and companies will face a huge fine if the customer data will be used inappropriately or is stolen. For example in 2011 PlayStation Network were hacked by LulzSec, Sony confirmed that personal and identifiable information from each of the 77 million accounts had been exposed.

Participate in two-way dialogue with potential criticism:

 Social media gives a company the opportunity to interact directly with their customers but it also gives those same customers a public platform where they can voice dissatisfaction with the company. These negative comments can cause the company to lose their existing customers but also their potential new customers. For example TalkTalk, many of their customers are voicing their displeasure with the service that they are providing this is why my mum never bought/used their internet even though it is cheaper than other options.

 

 

 

Wasting company time: Social media can be very addictive for some people and there is a potential risk that employees could spend a lot of time on it, employees could be less productive with their work and thus the organization’s business operations go down. I have done an interview with one employee, he said that he spends over 2hours of his working shift on social media sites, his productivity has drastically dropped over the period of the last 10 years due to social media.