According to a study titled Epicenters of Social Media Crises by Christian Faller, most of the social media crises in 2011 originated from Twitter and the author studied 30 social media crises in 2011, out of which 16 of the crises (53%) originated from twitter followed by Facebook (17%), Blogs (13%), YouTube (7%) and other platforms (10%). Most of the crisis are triggered by organization’s customers (54%) followed by organizations themselves (34%) and rest by opposing stakeholders (13%). Organizations customers complain about negative customer experiences (28.6%) followed by violations of ethical guidelines through the organization itself or its employees (25%), inappropriate content (10.7%), rogue employees (10.7%), failure to respond quickly (7.1%), violation of legal guidelines (3.6%), security breach (3.6%), inappropriate response(3.6%), community censorship(3.6%), lack of fact checking(3.6%) are the top causes of social media crises. As is evident in the study Twitter is the favorite platform for customers to vent their anger or negative feedback and the reason for this seems to be brevity of information as Twitter allows only 140 characters per update, users can exchange many different updates in a relatively short amount of time and information spreads much faster than on other channels which users can easily understand. Since many twitter users often forward messages even without reading them and the culture of sharing and forwarding messages as part of the social media culture which also leads to rise in self esteem as spreading message will obviously lead to increased reputation among the circle and the density of influencers and opinion leaders is very high on Twitter and they can easily share information through micro blogging in short messages. There has been a sudden spurt in twitter traffic for the particular company during the social media crisis that highlights the significance.
The study highlighted the fact that Twitter is a major epicenter for social media crises and businesses should have a proper strategy for managing their presence on the twitter. There should be a social media crisis tackling plan with a particular focus on twitter, businesses should be very careful in identifying and engaging the key influencers and opinion leaders that are dominating, regular communication with the twitter users and for this businesses should give the responsibility of managing the communication to specialist teams who not only engage with customers but also manage the content in terms of videos, photos, website links, etc, engage specialists if necessary for developing the content that engages the users. Businesses should be responding in a proper manner to customer’s positive and negative feedback. Particularly in case of negative feedback and social media crisis appropriate response should be given with a focus to lighten the mood, if necessary apology has to be tendered and make amends to the customers. Businesses should make sure that the crisis is properly handled by the responsible people and necessary steps need to be taken so that this will not be repeated in future. Not only is it difficult to build a presence on twitter but also it is equally difficult to maintain the presence on twitter and any negligence in maintaining the twitter presence will have a direct impact on the brand and company reputation. Christian Faller study highlights the major social media crises in 2011 and how companies have faltered. For maintaining the twitter presence businesses should train the employees and if necessary engage the specialist from the relevant agencies to develop and maintain the relevant Twitter strategy for the business.
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