Reputation risk vs Utility

Reputation risk vs Utility

 

We learned how to manage reputation risk on the internet personally. When we consider using social media or other user participatory communication platform for business, we would have similar issue but with a little different dimension. The definition of the “risk” in that case would be uncontrollability, unpredictability and impossibility to recover (as mentioned in the guest speaker discussion). Many people could be involved with company-managed SM for example, which means far more uncontrollability/unpredictability compared with individual case. One partial solution sometime used is restricting the use of those SM to CEO of the company only at least internally. This would be somewhat helpful to reduce uncontrollability/unpredictability.

 

However, if we pursue this idea too much, those communication platforms could be called into question their raison d'etre as efficient business tool. Here is an extreme example. A couple years ago, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA) and the Finland embassy in Japan had a limited-time twitter conversation to establish a further friendly relationship. The response from the Finland embassy was very quick. But that of MOFA was extremely slow because they obtained an approval from the top for every single tweet considering potential diplomatic problems. In the end of event, Finland embassy tweeted in casual Japanese “Looks like it’s time to go. I wanted to chat more.” This is too extreme but also shows that balancing reputation risk vs utility is not so easy once organizations are involved.