Social Media Risks

With the rise of social media dominance in the world today, it is no wonder that many organisations around the world has been actively implementing social media into their strategies. However, many of this organisations stands ill-informed as to the risks involved in such implementation and the need for thorough planning.

Risks in social media is pretty evident if you look closely enough. For all of us who has a social media account be it Facebook or twitter should be well aware of such risks. However, for an organisation; one would have to be even more vigilant as the legal risks involved has pretty serious consequences especially if the risk mitigation strategies are not sufficient enough. Some of the legal issues involved confidentiality, copyright, reputation, statutory and so on.

In this week’s activity, I would be highlighting on one of the giant players in the franchise pizza chain; Domino’s Pizza.

Domino’s pizza was founded in 1960 and it’s the second-largest pizza chain in the United States and the largest pizza chain worldwide. The first international store was opened in 1983 in Canada. The company was sold to Bain Capital, Inc. in 1998.

And now to the main gist of our topic today; social media risks with a highlight on Domino’s. Let’s get started! J

So remember about 4 years ago in 2009 when Patrick Doyle, the president of Domino’s Pizza announced to the whole world that their old pizzas were not up to the standard and hence introduced a completely new recipe and using social media, asked their customers for feedback? Now that’s what we call daring.

This approach has much risks involved and these includes

·      Reputation risk

·      Trade mark infringement

·      Misleading and deceptive conduct

·      Discrimination

·      Defamation

Once we heard of such campaigns, one would think: what could this do to the company’s reputation? What if most or all of the feedbacks came out negative? Or what if the public decides to condemn Domino’s Pizza for their new recipe? Think about it, they advertise worldwide that customers can provide feedback via social media and what would those less adventurous customers do? They would go to the social media page and read the feedback of the other customers before deciding to go and try it out for themselves.

Then there is the risk of trade mark infringement. As this campaign is pretty widespread, Domino’s might find this campaign being used by others for other purposes. For example, other social media users might decide to create for themselves another social media site with the same name and slogan to lure customers into their site.

Also, if Domino’s social media team is not careful, there might also be a risk for misleading and/or deceptive conduct. For example, should a customer decides to post a false claim on the social media feedback site and the team failed to notice or to take it down, the company might be facing a lawsuit.

What about discrimination? Let’s play along to this scenario; let's say a customer decides to post a comment in social media that directly discriminates a certain race or religion alongside their comment and this is not removed fast enough or was not removed at all, the consequence would most definitely not be good.

Lastly defamation. Having put up such feedback channels through social media would also mean that there would be a team of employees who would be responsible for responding to all the feedbacks. As a result the company would be held responsible for the response by the employee. If the response given is rendered defamation, then Domino’s pizza would be held liable.

So how can we handle such risks?

·      Training your social media team to be able to give appropriate response to the feedback whether good or bad

·      Also to have employees filtering out the feedbacks that pose as a risk to the company

·      The company would also need to be on the alert on whether there are any other individuals out there who are using their campaign for their benefit

Doyle puts it simply in an interview that the keys to running a successful organisation is honesty, transparency, consistency and customer engagement.

“Fess up, own it, and if something isn’t going well, admit that you’ve got the issue, do something about it, and people will react to it,”

-Patrick Doyle-

Well, that's it for today. Do feel free to leave comments below :)

Cheers!