#Sample College Essay

Social Media Tools in E-commerce

 

The ethical issues involved in social media use and how to address them

Social media marketing is the practice of attaining website traffic through the social media sites (Faulds, 2009). Social media tools like the Twitter, Faceboook, Pinterest, and Instagram are now an important part of people’s lives.  Not only has social media sites been popular with younger generations, they have also been embraced by the older generations. Nevertheless, the social media sites bring both rewards and challenges especially in E – commerce. There are a number of ethical issues that are connected with the use of social Medias in conducting business online. Among the ethical issues, the following are included:

Privacy and sharing of private information

When using social media, it is not easy to prove that people are actually who they say they are. With this problem is not easy to know if a person or business is really true in the information that is being provided.  Besides this, the social media sites like Facebook create a depository of people’s personal information. The social Medias keep archives of people’s information instead of replacing them. The government for example has been collecting citizens’ information both personal and private, something that raises deep concerns. Teenagers on the other hand are freely giving out their information without knowing the dangers they put themselves in through such exposure.  To solve this issue of security, people should be educated about the dangers of exposing their personal information on social Medias. There should also be policies that govern how the social Medias are used by different organizations and remedies for organizations that go against the policies.

Credibility

The social Media is suffering great credibility issue. The new information source is offering people chances of accessing very wide range of information that benefits them in one way or another.  The accessibility of such knowledge is empowering people to become civil developers, critical thinkers and also to be aware of their environs. Open data allows people also in highlighting problems and issues in their community.  Nevertheless, it is not always that the social media is offering helpful information to citizens.  Some of the information provided in the social media is not credible.  The data found in the social media is sometimes unfiltered, hence making majority of the data raw.  Some of the information on these sites is not from reliable sources and therefore it can be untrue and misleading.  People lack protection from fake information and do not have ways of verifying which information is reliable and which is not.

The issue of credibility can only be solved through people being keen to verify that the location of the source is credible. For instance, is the person tweeting about an incident in the location of the incident? Secondly, people should find out about background of a network and who follows it. The content from a source should also be in a position to corroborate with other sources. Only this way will the information in the site be proved to be reliable.

Maintaining trust and honestly in marketing and advertising

Businesses should always ensure that their marketing strategy through the social media is not misleading, offensive or harmful as under the CAP code. These obligations apply equally to all online marketing (Grifoni, 2012).  People should also be made reliable of any information they provide on social media which includes any comments made on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.  For a business to build honesty and trust in the social Media marketing, organizations should ensure they create regular conversations with their customers. Secondly, an organization should ensure that the audiences are engaged through seeking their suggestions and opinions. An organization should further open up to customers through telling them of the business level, challenges and other such issues.  In case of mistakes or complains from the customers, the business should be willing to give explanation and apologies if necessary.

Maintaining reputation

It is important for any organization to maintain its online information. This is because reputation affects the purchasing decisions of customers and also influences the growth of a business. Social Media are the best platforms of managing the online reputations. A business should ensure that it responds to crisis as well as monitor the audiences’ conversation to prevent more crises in future. People are freely enjoying airing their views about a company through creating social media profiles. Companies should also open social media accounts in order to manage the peoples’ conversations through responding to them in timely way (Krista, 2013).

How a business handles a crisis online makes a vast difference to the prospect ramifications. It’s therefore vital to check and act in response to customers who post on the wall of the organization or send messages to resolve any complaints and let customers know they are valued and heard. A business can have ability to full time manage and monitor its reputation on social media through using Social media monitoring tools. Through the use of monitoring tools a business will be able to quickly respond to praise or defend itself from offensive or negative posts and discussions.

References

Faulds, D. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Indiana University

Krista, E. (2013). Social media marketing: a strategic approach. Mason, OH: South-Western Cengage

Grifoni, P. (2012). SNeM2S: A Social Network Model for Marketing Strategies in International journal of e-business development; The World Academic Publishing Co