Questions on PR & Employees Feedback on Social Media

Sep 10, 2015

Hi Prof and friends 🙂

I have some queries in mind:

Regarding the integration of PR & marketing efforts eg by Starhub / SingTel. Both have very high market share on the telco segment in Sg. Telecommunication is part of a necessity too. As such, how necessary is actually PR for these two (personally for me and I guess for most customers, what we look for is the quality of their service not much of their brand impression or something)? They could have allocated the resources more on winning in terms of quality from competitors perhaps?

2. Regarding today’s lecture on employees’ feedback may hamper the reputation of their former companies. I was wondering if such behaviour would backfire the employees instead? With the social media their posts & messages can be easily shared and perhaps, potential employers may also come to notice such posts. Would not this instead also hamper the reputation of this employee (or in a way ‘scare’ employers to hire him)?. Is there any better platform than social media or a more credible way to use the social media to bring about such issue to also increase credibility?

Thanks a lot 🙂

Cheerios,

Anastasia

3 responses to “Questions on PR & Employees Feedback on Social Media”

KyuJIn SHIM

September 11, 2015 at 1:23 am

Question 1:
I think the reason behind their PR efforts is mainly the fact that the service quality or price might not be factors that significantly differentiate their service from other competitors’ as there is little (if any) difference in network technology nowadays. To be specific, I myself have been feeling no difference in terms of the calling quality between Starhub (my previous mobile carrier) and SingTel (my current mobile carrier).

So to make a different look and feel about the brand, many Telcos have been trying to build good relationships with their customers. For example, what determines SingTel’s image and reputation might be the people (e.g., employees’ communication with consumers). That is why SingTel launched the campaign with foreign workers who are the major customer group for prepaid services. Although they put a lot of service information in the middle of the video clip, the main purpose and emphasis was given to the creation of a good image by personification of the brand as benevolent patrons for foreign workers in Singapore.

Question 2:
I think social media might be an indirect tool to connect many people based on the working place whether it is former or current. As we already talked about, it’s just like a cocktail party! For example, I encountered one professor (let’s say Prof. A) who is very critical and skeptical of his former University. Even though he will not likely post it on social media, he has a lot of professional connection through Facebook, LinkedIn or other platforms. So if some professor, Prof B got a job offer from the same University where Prof A had worked for, then Prof B might want to approach Prof A to get more reliable information about the University via mutual friends on Facebook, etc. And social media makes it easy to connect with relevant people (in this case former employee).

Hence, even if Prof A wisely chooses not use social media for a public attack against his previous work place and there will not be direct damage to Prof A’s reputation, the University’s reputation will be negatively affected by his bad mouthing through face-to-face communication or interpersonal communication that might be connected “to mutual network facilitated by the social media”.

Thank you for your contribution and we’re going to talk about more details about issues and risks with the employees’ use of social media tomorrow.

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anastasiasetyadi2015

September 11, 2015 at 10:16 pm

Noted Prof, thank you 🙂

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1. KyuJIn SHIM
  
  September 15, 2015 at 4:55 pm
  
  Plus, I think they can use a lot of anonymous forums or mobile apps. such as “rate my employer” (US), “Blind” (Korea) or “whisper” (US) etc. These apps allow you post contents in a self-effacing way and many people do bad mouthing about the company. We will cover this issue in the W9 crisis communication module.
  Thank you.
  
  http://www.ratemyemployer.ca/Employer-Ratings/Search-an-employer.aspx
  
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