Responding to a crisis with social media
In this article Dr Chris Phethean discusses examples of companies that have successfully used social media to diffuse a business crisis.
The British telecommunications company O2 took to social media to respond to customers who were having problems during an outage of their mobile phone signal.
This hands-on approach, dealing directly with each customer’s individual comment, was only possible because of the Web and social media – and the public nature of it meant that even those who weren’t customers of O2 could see the effort they were going to in order to apologies to their users.
It is this personal channel that creates the really unique value to social media and sites like Twitter that emphasise quick comments allow this type of customer service to be carried out effectively, and increases the strength of the relationship between customer and business.
Think back to the discussion in Week 1 about the relative influence of the individuals within a social media community. What roles might ‘influential’ people play in resolving (or escalating) cases like these?
© University of Southampton 2017
