Social media, thoughts after the presentation

This is the second week of fall semester in Newhouse! Philip R. Johnson gave us a presentation about social media in public relations. Here are my thoughts about what he present.

There are many insightful points in the presentation. Firstly, understanding the situation of an organization is more important than using social media that are popular at the moment. Many organizations are using social media as a platform to communicate with the public. However, this tendency does not suggest that social media are always good for every organization. An organization should think about contents, frequency of posting, crisis management when something goes wrong in social media and all kinds of situations that it will confront when using social media at the very beginning.

Secondly, I strongly agree with "the big principle"--focus on relationships, not the technologies. Recently, an well-known Chinese English teacher Li Yang has accused of domestic violence. His wife posts pictures and micro-blogs through  Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter (click here to see his wife's Weibo). Li Yang has  Weibo account as well (click here to see Li Yang's Weibo). However, facing tons of comments about the violence following his regular micro-blogs, he replies nothing and gives no comment about the accusation.

This is not merely a personal crises. As the founder of Li Yang Crazy English, his silence jeopardizes his company. This is an example of how relationship is not well managed when using social media. While social media offer great opportunities for the public to understand an organization or a person, they also allow the public spread negative information widely and fast.

Furthermore, personally, I agree with the statement "relational schema favors benefits of mutual/accurate exchanges of real self-experiences." My favorite GRE teacher Luo Yonghao is a public figure, the founder of Laoluo English School . His micro-blogs are quite different from many other well-known English teachers such as Li Yang and Yu Minhong.

Luo's blog is quite personal, with all the micro-blogs written by himself expressing his own thoughts about anything he finds interesting. He also reply others' comments time to time. Whereas Li and Yu's micro-blogs are always written with the style of chicken soup for the soul. They are less personal and not written by themselves. Few comments following get replied.

It is a common situation that people pay more attention on the CEO or founders of organizations rather than the organizations themselves. Because people are more willing to talk to a person than an organization especially people don't even know who is behalf on it. However, still, many people seem like micro-blogs that share no real self-experiences in China.

I'm not sure whether this situation differs from cultures. One phenomenon in Chinese social media is many people love the style of "chicken soup for the soul". Celebrities are followed and liked by thousands of fans, even though no comments are replied. Probably it is because celebrities are people and organizations are not. However, sometimes the boundary between webpages of a person and webpages of organizations is not quite clear.

In addition,  I do not totally agree with "shorter posts, higher frequency" strategy. This strategy can be very annoying if the frequency is too high. People do not want to see a full screen of tweets from only one organization. When I meet this situation, I will unfollow this organization's twitter in order to leave some space for tweets from others.

Finally, in respect of full truth, Internet users may want to know that, but sometimes, the full truth may be related to someone else' privacy or other rights. Therefore I think people need to fully consider consequences before telling full truth.



Overall, many principles are quite helpful to understand how to use social media. However, it must take great effort to follow these rules for long-term management.