Social Snowball

Social networking is many things under one umbrella. It uses urban language; it uses formal and informal language. It can be friendly or it can be deadly.

Most of the social networking sites now days are for social communication online. They are made for people to make (online, as sad as that sounds) friends.

Also, thank you to those reading my post 'Being Creative' and lets get the readership flowing. I'm sure there are young PR students who would love to discuss the topic so comment below. Suggestions, opinions and discussions are all welcome - it's what we do anyway, isn't it? Follow me on Instagram @dasha_x10 and I will follow you back! :)

Social networking parasites

AS IT IS VERY WELL KNOWN, people share their opinions, activities and basically - all the social trends are now developed mostly online. Instagram is the most used platform for girls which mean where all the fashion ideas do are being developed on what? Probably Instagram.

Facebook is not so much of a challenge for public relations practitioner because it is seen as a site which just connects friends and families together

The real thing

Now when we look at Twitter for example, lots of companies are starting to use this as a means of communications with their audience. Starbucks uses it the most out of all the companies out there. Maybe they like to share how good their coffee is with everyone. The only downfall, is as Rebecca Gudgeon, the Business Development Director from Grayling, quotes is the high interactivity level of audience among EACHOTHER which gives them more room to judge and discuss a business or a company. She states:

"One negative blog post or customer tweet can quickly

snowball and dispersed customers with common complaints (or

indeed any complaints) can join forces online in real time...

Intelligent blogger relations, community building, real-time

social media monitoring and a well prepared social media

response plan better helps to mitigate risks."

So we know that if a consumer either says anything bad about the company on the social website, this can result in a 'snowball', and we do not want that!!!

Defences (avoidance)

A way in which we can avoid all this from happening is monitoring the field, again as Rebecca quotes, and I agree completely. I have started my blog on Instagram and before doing that, I checked all the statistics.

I know that the best days to post are Fri-Sun. I now that people like to watch videos after 9pm no matter which day it is. And, what my teacher has taught me, bloggers like to see things about people - not buildings! But, sometimes when I look at 'famous' bloggers pages and see they post pictures of trees and think, "2000+ likes - nonsense! They're followers are either fans or just supporting them because of a culture or something." But I know this isn't true, because they are just bloggers who post about themselves most of the time and not of buildings anyway.

So it helps to be in the field to know the field. When you are monitoring the field well then you know what your audiences want. It is also always better to interact with your audience so they know who you are and which company you are from.



P.S. I would recommend reading this blog if you already haven't: http://danielghebert.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/why-i-should-work-for-radian6/. Daniel Ghebert is great and very inspiring writer.