Engaging Social Media - The Beginning

“A social media program can plug into every type of business function you need it to and help you make it work better, smarter, and faster” (Blanchard, 2011, p. 8). Here we observe the fundamental idea of how important social media is in organizational communication. Before we leap into examples, we should first focus on organizations engage their audiences and how social media plays a large role in that influence.

According to Olivier Blanchard (2011) in order to understand the importance of social media inclusion in an organization, we must first understand the vertical and lateral forces of organizational communication. We will do this in a fun way – nobody really enjoys bars and graphs – so here is a cute puppy providing us with an example of how the one directional vertical engagement works:

Here we have an example of One-Directional Vertical Engagement. Before the advent of social media, organizations (represented as the older bigger golden retriever) could only communicate at the audience (represented by the puppies). In short, their communication was one-direction. The message was sent and the audience would either accept it or not. The audience and consumers could communicate with the organization of course, "through customer service, comment cards or protesting" (Blanchard, 2011, p. 9). Mostly, however, the communication was one-directional. 

Figure two portrays an example of lateral engagement - lateral engagement is the word-of-mouth. Essentially, after the big dog sends the message the puppies decode that message and share it amongst themselves. During this word-of-mouth process, the puppies will encode their own meaning into the original message and diffuse that information to those who have not had a chance to experience the organization's influence. Before social media, chances are that because of each individual's busy schedule, by the time you got around to recommending or criticizing something with another individual it was no longer on your mind (Blanchard, 2011, p. 10). Now that social media exists, the public can share or make comments about an organization and the services it offers in seconds, while it is on your mind, in a way that either endorses the brand or displays dislike. 

All large organizations are a great target for examples, mostly because they are difficult to miss after the dart is thrown. So, for example, let’s take Disney’s 2017 hike on admission prices to their theme parks, their 2017 run-in with the department of labor, and another example of Disney itself and apply the aforementioned rules of engagement.

         In February of 2017, Disney increased their ticket prices to their theme parks making them five dollars more expensive - making what was once a $97 admission for adults, to a $102 admission price (Tuttle, 2017). This hike was reported on by KTLA news and shared amongst its various audiences who, in turn, commented and shared the same news story. Comments raised from "we will have to refinance our house just for a day at Disney" to "Disney hates poor people". Only a month later, KTLA reported and shared another news story to social media outlets this time revealing that Disney had been forcing employees to pay for their uniforms/outfits, often deducting the fee from their paychecks. This meant that their employees were being paid less than minimum wage (CNN Wire, 2017).More comments flooded these social media news updates ranging from, "Disney doesn't care about you or your children, only money" to "Disney should be able to afford to pay their employees more than minimum wage and provide them with an free outfit to boot - shame on you disney". All the while, Disney has been quiet about these occurrences on social media, choosing to focus on promoting their upcoming live-action version of Beauty and the Beast.

Just with these comments alone you can start to get the idea of how an organization, such as the media, will vertically engage their audiences. In turn, you will see how those audiences will diffuse the information via lateral engagement while concurrently encoding their own meanings into the Disney reputation. After encoding their own messages, they then return that information as a comment to the original source.  

References

Blanchard, O. (2011). Social media ROI: managing and measuring social media efforts in your organization. Indianapolis: Que Pub.

CNN Wire. (2017, March 17). Disney Forced by Labor Department to Pay $3.8 Million to Park Workers Charged for Their Costumes. Retrieved March 20, 2017, from http://ktla.com/2017/03/17/disney-forced-by-labor-department-to-pay-3-8-million-to-park-workers-charged-for-their-costumes/

Tuttle. (2017). Disney Park Prices Increase, Universal Studios Will Follow | Money. Retrieved March 20, 2017, from http://time.com/money/4668833/disney-theme-park-prices-universal/