Have You Experienced Groundswell?

Have you ever imagined that if you posted an incident of violence on social media, will the police investigate the incident immediately? The most likely scenario is that no one pays attention to your post and several days later, the post will be drowned by the huge flood of information on the Internet.

Then, if there are 1,000,000 social media accounts reposting it or posting blogs with the topic, what will happen? The police will act quickly, the media like newspaper, TV will report the incident comprehensively, people will help finding out the perpetrator. People unit on the Internet and become strong and powerful.

This is not a theoretical scenario. This is what happened in Yunnan Province, China. A young lady was on the trip in Yunnan. One day, when she had dinner in a restaurant talking with friends, a group of local men imitated and made fun of her accent. The young lady expressed her displeasure to them, trying to stop them. Can imagine what happened next? Those men didn’t stop and even became angry. They attacked the young lady, assaulting her hardly on the face. Serious wounds made on the young lady’s face. She called the police immediately to report the violence, however, the police dealt with the case in a sloppy way. The young lady posted the incident and the pictures of wounds on her social media page, which was reposted 503,000 times with 522,000 comments. The police once asked her to delete the post, but that just became another “Barbra Streisand House”. After the online traffic, near everyone in the nation put eyes on the incident, which urged the police and other administration to inquire.

That’s the groundswell. That’s the power the Internet gives to people. People unit online and connect with each other even don’t know each other. As it is mentioned in Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies, “people were using tools to link up with each other in various ways, and those trends were threatening to companies” (Li & Bernoff, 2011). The immeasurable strength of the netizen union forces the companies as well as authorities to listen to their voice and requirements. That is, let us say, the progress of democracy.

Two-way Or Still One-Way?

More and more corporations choose social media as a new channel for them to communicate with the public. It is low-cost and it is a two-way symmetrical fashion. According to social media sites, corporations can listen to the public’s concerns and have the opportunity to address these concerns in more ethical ways. However, the reality is on the contrary to the studies. 

Corporations are using social media as a way to convey information to their followers rather than a way to communicate with them. According to Portree and Seltzer (2009), corporations did not build on dialogic opportunities by having anyone available to answer the posts.For most of the time when a user posts a complaint or a concern and remind the corporation by “@“ it on the  SNS, there would be no reply or just a meaningless auto reply. 

So what could be the reasons for the unpleasant reality? The reasons for the reality maybe that for a very long time, corporations used media and public relations strategies just to announce information to the public. They didn’t pay much attention to the public’s reaction, just hoping to let the public know the news. In this way, it needs time for corporations to get used to the new model of communication. 

Second, not only are the corporations not familiar with the new two-way communication, the public also needs time to accept this model. Before the digital time, the public was used to receive news passively. As the technology developed quickly, only a group of people are aware of communicating with corporations actively. From this aspect, corporations are not willing to invest much in responding posts. 

Rather than official outlets of corporation news, the corporation blogs should be seen as a tool of advertisement. Corporations always post its positive side on blogs in order to attract more customers. They emphasize their faith and culture as well as praise themselves for its social responsibility. We never learn one corporation’s scandal from its corporation blog. In this sense, I think no matter how much efforts the PR officers make, credibility is always absent. 

With the development of social media, more and more journalists rely on searching on the Internet for news stories. It is efficient and convenient. From clicking the mouse and looking at the google pages, journalists can make more releases with less time than before. However, one of the unethical problems here is that among the overloaded information on the Internet, it is difficult for users to detective whether the news is true or just a fake story. Journalists can search for news on Internet, but they should use the online information as a source of news after investigating carefully.