Case study and social media disasters

1. Case study

I work at Suomen Nuortentalo. I wanted to do a case study about a social service company, because usually their use of social media differs from other kind of companies.

In my field of work there isn't much that we can post on the internet. We need to make sure that clients and residents don't appear on the photos and on the texts that we post. Social media is mainly a place to inform people about the diseases and difficulties our residents have. For example Suomen Nuortentalo has posted on Facebook articles about Asperger syndrome. In Facebook there are also information to the youngsters for example about camps and summer jobs.

The most important thing to remember is that we can't have our residents as our Facebook friends. We need to make sure that the residents understand that this our work, in our personal life is our own. If a residents mind is unstable, being friends on social media could also be dangerous.

We workers cannot use our Facebook page. Superiors are the only ones who can. I think that they should assign someone to be in charge of the social media, because now the page isn't updated too often. I think that Facebook would be a perfect place to "sell" our facilities and to tell people about the methods that we use.

So this was a bit different case study but I felt that I wanted to incorporate social services in this blog somehow!

2.Social media disasters

In November 2015, Australia's Victorian Taxi Association launched its #YourTaxis campaign to get customers' feedback about its service. It didn’t go quite as planned. The hashtag quickly became a repository for stories about drivers committing horrible violent and sexually abusive acts against customers. The campaign was launched at Monday and by Wednesday night the situation was so bad that the agency tried to make things better, only to make it worse. They used Remembrance Day hashtag on twitter to promote the campaign, a move which many social media users called-out as being disrespectful. The tweet read: “#RememberanceDay 600,000 taxi trips are taken by war Veterans and widows for treatment purposes. Lest We Forget. #yourtaxis.” All of this in just a few days. At the end, the agency behind the campaign was fired.  

In March 2015? SeaWorld opened itself up to complaints with an #AskSeaWorld hashtag. The company had

been on rough path ever since the movie “Blackfish” became popular on Netflix. The hashtag was then hijacked and became a trending topic on Twitter as pointed questions went viral. SeaWorld could have save the game by apologizing and changing its policies. But it didn’t.  Instead, after #AskSeaWorld, the brand has used Twitter to fight allegations stemming from Blackfish, gaining retweets along with angry comments. Not very smart move, but luckily for SeaWorld, people are starting to forget this disaster, and their follower growth has now been steady.

3. Social media in ten years

I think that social media will more and more in peoples’ lives year after year. Customer service will become more reliant by social media and internet. I a bit worried if our children will be so used to talk via social media that they communicate through screens more than with face to face. On the other hand social media connects people from all over the world and people with same interest find each other.