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!

My Favourite Fast Food Restaurant - Maccas

Hi there again. I hope everyone is doing great this week. 

This week's topic is identify and discuss some of the major benefits and value levers associated with implementing Enterprise 2.0

McDonalds

Before I begin, allow me to introduce to you McDonalds. If you do now know what is McDonalds which I believe everyone does, McDonalds is the largest and world-wide known chain of hamburger fast food restaurant. It all started from Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1940 as a barbecue restaurant. McDonald's restaurant is operated by a franchisee, an affiliate, or the corporate itself.

McDonalds is actively promoting their product through Facebook. Although I really do love Maccas and it's my favourite fast food, I do not know or update myself with the latest promotion through television or through the radio as I do not listen or watch television and radio very often.




Recently Maccas throughout the whole Australia is having this promotion if you buy any extra value meal you will get a FREE CocaCola Glass. I get to know about this promotion when this post appears in my newsfeed.

Personally, although I do like Maccas but I wouldn't go crazy over it by checking out their promotion at their outlet itself.

Besides promoting their offer, they too have some competitions that are promoted through Facebook itself.

Big Mac Chant Challenge

I don't even realise there's a competition that is being held. The last time I've been to Maccas, I wasn't told or notified that there's a competition nor I saw any posters about it around Maccas. Nevertheless, it is posted up on Facebook and it allows me to find more about the competition. 

The picture above shows that McDonalds have some interactive competition on their website allowing anyone who has a Facebook account to vote and share the video to their own peers. You can vote as many videos as you wish but only once for each video. It's really good to see there's interaction between both sides and not just McDonalds pumping all the information to customers and customers aren't able to decide the winner or play a part in the competition.

In this conversation on the left, we can identify that McDonalds is replying a customer that is having a problem with uploading a video for the competition mentioned above. It's great to see that McDonalds actually do respond and do not leave their customers hanging. That's a very good way to use social technology for marketing communication or interaction. On top of that it also provides customer care via social technology. 

All in all, I can say that at least McDonalds Australia really do use Facebook and their website to really have this interaction between them and customers to connect each other and as well as doing most of their marketing, promotion, advertisements, and competitions available on Facebook to even connect to more people. 

Hope you guys enjoy reading it. 

Till next time. 

Top 5 blogging feature

Hey guys. I hope everyone is doing great!

Well, it's already week 3 of uni. We're given two options this week to choose between beginner or advance level of blogger.

The reason why I choose Option 1 is because it has been a while since I last blogged.

Option 1

1. Follow / subscribe
Basically what is means is that I subscribe to a particular blog, I could get update on their recent post. Blogspot has this feature where you could add a blog you wish to subscribe and it will just appear in your dashboard every time you login to Blogspot. To read more, you could also click on the Title at the Dashboard and it will direct you to the blog. Example, I subscribe to http://346class13.blogspot.com.au/ and any future post, I will be notified in my Dashboard and it makes it so much easier that I wouldn't need to remember the link to the website.

Follow feature

Blogs that I've followed

2. Chatbox
When I use to blog, there was this thing that was really popular which was having a chatbox at your blog. It is to ease your readers to actually just input their comment or having a chat with your readers. Blogspot comment feature is useful but what if there's someone who doesn't have a blogger account that wants to comment? Chatbox is the right feature to add on to your blog.

Chatbox

3. Live Traffic Feed
It is a feature that enables you to find out where do your blog got accessed from like different part of the world. It's like a demographic feature that you could add on to your blog.

Live Traffic Feed

4. Online Poll
This is the fun part in a blog. Back in those days, my friends and I like to insert a online poll. This enables the blogger and readers to have some interactive activity. Not only that it allows readers to actually understand reader's choice or decision. I have to admit that this online poll feature is actually really fun when you have so many readers as you may never know what is the final result is until you close the voting session.

Online Poll

5. Labels
Before Twitter and Facebook existed, Blogger use to have this feature called "Label" while as these days we known it as "Hashtags". At the very end of each post, we could insert different labels that could you to describe the post or to make it sound more interesting. At the end of our day, if we would like to search for "happy" all post regarding that keyword will appear.

Labels

Those features mention above are the TOP 5 blogging feature that I would recommend to all bloggers out there who would want make their blog a little more interesting. 

Before I go, here's a fun tip for everyone.

PS: Only works on Chrome Internet Browser

1. Go to YouTube

2. Play any desired video

3. Type "1980" at the start of the video 

4. Enjoy!

Have a great weekend ahead guys!

First post in 2013

Hey guys. To be frank, this isn't my first time blogging. I first started blogging when I was 12. That's just under a decade. It's pretty hilarious how I started blogging. I've no idea where this trend came out but everyone at my age started to open up an account and started blogging so did I. We then had this habit of having a post every single day after school. However I then stopped after a year or two.

We had this crazy thing of having our own blog and started to customise our layouts pretty often. Back in those days Facebook didn't exist and what could we all do was to have our own blog as social interaction in the web as well as FRIENDSTER.

MSN messenger back in the days. 

MSN messenger if you could remember which Microsoft shut that service down recently. Not forgetting they played a part in the social world too.

Enough of history, I shall get onto the goal of this post. I'll get straight to the point. Honestly I didn't think that blogging would have strategies. I thought it would all be how interesting the topic would be, the layout and how it is advertised or promoted.

After the lecture, I gave a thought of it and it's really true that if we do not have a strategy, how could we achieve our goals. Below is my strategies of how to be a successful blog.

1. Have a great layout in my blog. Something that is attractive yet clean and easy to navigate.
2. Write a great post every week with great writing skills.
3. Comment on other classmates post and get reply too.
4. Insert hashtag in my link when I share my post in Facebook & Twitter.

I found this blog that caught my attention and the topics are pretty interesting as well. I do like the layout and design because it's clean and easy to navigate. Besides that it has a small section where it allows readers to read what that post is all about. That enables readers to get a little bit of information of what the post is all about. Unlike blogspot's default layout where it has all the post in one page and it is so troublesome to scroll all the way down to read the other posts.

I think that's pretty much it for this week. Do let me know if you guys have anything to comment on my post. I'll definitely return you a favour of commenting on your post if you'd leave one on mine.

Cheers guys!

Take care all.