Social media heroes or villains?

I have had the privilege this week of being handed the access to the Commshero Twitter account as a guest tweeter. It has been really enjoyable being myself but using someone else’s account. But I have also felt quite a pressure to ensure that I am doing the best I can with every single one of the tweets.

Tonight  (23 July 2015) a new programme starts on ITV2 called Safeword. I am waiting to view it but it appears to be focused on celebrities allowing their social media accounts to be hacked by others. I am not sure it is going to make fantastic viewing but it made me wonder why me using another account and accounts being taken over was such a big issue.

For all of it the key is reputation. When we post anything on social media it has the potential to either enhance or damage our reputation. We all have to be effective and proficient communicators in the 21st century. Just one badly worded tweet or inappropriate Facebook post has the potential to become an international story or issue in a way that a wrong word said in conversation never could.

We all try to build a positive reputation and for celebrities a poor use of social media has the likelihood of backfiring and creating more problems for them. I am surprised that they have had many of the famous coming forward to allow people to take over their social media accounts. I am sure that many people who potentially viewed the hacked posts didn’t realise what was happening and the result may be a loss of confidence and trust.

At work we give many hundreds of police officers and staff the ability to be able to post and tweet on behalf of the organisation. This is done with training, monitoring and ongoing support but I can understand why many companies are still struggling with this concept. The potential for reputational damage is always there which is why the training is so important. I know that many of the officers and staff who are taking this opportunity are also aware of the responsibility they have taken on.

It is good to be aware of the pitfalls and potential problems, but I am sure that giving people the opportunity of using social media for corporate accounts has to be the way forward for all. This week tweeting on the Commshero account has been an eye opener for me and I will approach my social media posting with a little more scrutiny from now on.

Advertisements
This entry was posted in communication, social media, social networking and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Social media heroes or villains?

  1. Roger Nield says:

    Reblogged this on Simple Things and commented:
    I really like Amanda’s work – enjoy.

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

w

Connecting to %s
https://amandacomms1.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/social-media-heroes-or-villains/
amandacomms1.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-26
74396
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:BQUNBBTFY7A44BQIP5AQUIPGU62YCIKA
<urn:uuid:fb8ffc93-2b29-470d-82e0-f06e79ea79ac>
2018-06-24T18:08:20Z
192.0.78.13
text/html
sha1:SVQMBUJWKDGMXC6KKVFJF5EJMHWOSLFY
<urn:uuid:0005c8f6-457f-40f3-94ee-a56e9258e6d8>
https://amandacomms1.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/social-media-heroes-or-villains/
response
<urn:uuid:05e59c66-b2c4-4a8f-ad0b-c6f5d26ed4b5>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-144-111-253.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf