MNG81001 SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY - CASE STUDY

MEMORANDUM

Presently, most of the organisations highly believe in their presence in social media. For several reasons, organisations prioritise their social media presence, especially for the marketing purpose. Organisations also seek to publish its social media policies for its employees to confine their actions which may affect reputation. In a similar way, Sunshine 100 should have initially focused on providing clear social media policies which would have avoided the event led to negative consequences for Sunshine 100. To outline the importance of social media policies, this memo aims to identify the potential advantages and disadvantages for using social media, the impact of employee’s comment/post on brand reputation and how and what a company can cover in its social media policies. This memo will include a communication strategy followed by a communication plan to communicate social media policies with the employees. 

Potential advantages and disadvantages of an organization when using social media?

Social media has essentially changed the way how businesses interact with the target audience and public at large. Facebook is often cited as a top social media platform where businesses interact with the audience. Social media helps businesses in many ways (Aral, Dellarocas and Godes, 2013). 

Advantages

Social media has been the most commonly used social platform where businesses take benefits of cost-effective and attractive interaction with the audience. For Sunshine 100, social media can be helpful in creating brand image and reputation, brand awareness, customer interactions and feedbacks and ultimately creating brand loyalty. These are the foremost advantages of social media, (especially Facebook) for Sunshine 100 to promote the launch of KidsEats. 

Disadvantages

Businesses that use social media platform explicitly to promote itself in the target audience, need to pay proper attention to the potential drawbacks of social media. Like Sunshine 100, many other organisations may also have witnessed the unfortunate events that have led to a bad reputation. Social media requires regular evaluation to ensure its effective use. Social media often led the organisation to have a bad reputation by promoting negative feedbacks and posts against the brand. Sunshine 100 faced similar drawback by one of its employees, for not communicating the social media policy to its employees.