Crisis Management Strategies Needed by Facebook - Case Study Example

Crisis Management Strategies Needed By Facebook In present times, Facebook is a platform that is pocketed in every person’s smartphone. Most individuals around you have a Facebook profile that serves as his or her social hub where the latest updates of the owner’s life are shared with friends and family. While all this is great in the perspective of usability, many believe that Facebook can be used as a crisis management tool often. What we fail to perceive is that Facebook, itself, needs some excellent crisis management strategies (Mitroff et al, 289) to support its presence in the market. With the present popularity of the social networking site, it is not surprising if customer based grievances and lawsuits addressing the same creep up. Facebook has been getting into media spotlight for rapidly changing its privacy policy and this does not go down well with the users. The Main Problems In addition to changes in privacy policy, Facebook has a chance of ending up in any one or more of the following crisis situations: Account Hacking: Hacking a Facebook account has become a game for nerdy hackers who find passwords in a matter of minutes and can use the Facebook page or account of a company, a celebrity or an important official to broadcast news or extract data. Due to the notoriety of hackers, it can be said that Facebook may face lawsuits for account security negligence, which can happen any time a hacker chooses to give our false or sensitive information through an important profile. Technical Back-up Crisis: Facebook is a platform that has realized its marketing goals basing on the sole factor that the platform is available for complete use 24/7. A single technical snag or breakdown in the software and hardware that controls back-up processes can cause heavy loss to the company. Not only will the site be unavailable for a day or two, but Facebook will lose its user base and also seem more vulnerable to attacks of cyber criminals who may try to grab the chance to steal sensitive information about the software, programs, and hardware that run Facebook. The security of information stored, the guarantee of retrieving every bit of it and the assurance of having Facebook working back in normal capacities will turn into major doubts in the minds of people around the world leading to heavy losses for the company. Fake Accounts: The occurrence of fake accounts over Facebook is a very unhealthy fact about the website. Nine percent of the accounts registered on Facebook are fake and there have been many users complaining about theft of their pictures and identity by creators of such fake accounts. While, the exact aim of fake account creators differs from one to another, the crisis that Facebook might have to handle at a later stage is against its failure to stop the creation of such fake IDs and lack of appropriate crisis management strategies and steps in its registration protocol. Main Crisis Management Strategies That Can Help The four crisis management strategies that we propose in this study are important for Facebook to be able to avoid the above mentioned crises. Password Updation: Facebook’s initial step should be to develop an automated password updating schedule that asks the user to change his password and security questions once in every six months or whenever there is fishy activity noticed in the account. This is a policy that has been adopted by Microsoft that requires the user to change the password and reaffirm the security authentication protocol at regular intervals of time. Social Network Profile Authentication: As seen in many social networking sites, validation of a new profile is possible only after he or she has connected with other social media or email accounts that the platform recognizes to be valid and legitimate. Such validity steps often put the careless fake account creator in trouble. Using this strategy, Facebook can reduce the occurrence of fake accounts by a great percentage (Syme, 1). Email source Checking: Many people have two Facebook profiles created through personal and professional mail IDs. While professional email IDs are great to authenticate a person’s career growth, they should be used for the purpose of creating official portfolios or pages for a brand or company. Ideally, each person must use his or her personal email ID to like comment or participate in company related events or activities on Facebook (Magnesi et al, 12). In addition to removing individual profiles created using official mail IDs, checking the authenticity of the email service provider being used by the profile holder is a great way to maintain standards. Security Questions: Facebook, like all other sites have a standard set of security questions set at the time of registration, which the user selects, answers and keeps on record for use when authenticating the user log in details on a later date from a different machine. Facebook can start utilizing other security check protocols like image identification and location submission to better monitor its user base. Discussion The above four crisis management strategies help address the three issues discussed at the beginning of this article adequately well. The first strategy of sending password change reminders and locking accounts that are not active in participating in the process will help keep out hackers and also remove the fake accounts maximally as it is not always possible for a person managing four or five fake accounts to authenticate passwords from different mails every time a reminder comes in six months (Symeoune, 1). People who are unable to update their passwords in spite of having legitimate accounts will understand the blocked version and will update whenever they come online next on Facebook. The second strategy is to determine the validity of the account using multiple identities across the web, which may belong to the person’s Google, Microsoft and Twitter accounts. While it is understandable that asking every person’s ID proof is a cumbersome process and will put Facebook’s popularity in trouble, account linking through Twitter, Google plus and other social networking sites is definitely a great way to separate the grains from the husk. At present, Facebook only uses mobile number authentication to back a person’s personal information. The third strategy is to check the email IDs used for registration. This will address two problems together. Firstly, it keeps the fake IDs away from the main lot, and secondly, it helps add to the back-up data in a way that Facebook knows whether to allow a mail provider next time there is a new applicant using the unreliable source. This prevents entry of scam mail IDs in the Facebook database. The fourth crisis management strategy has two facets to itself. Firstly, users can be surer of security. Secondly, Facebook can be more sure of security when technical failures like machine, hardware or software breakdown occurs at their main server (Pearson & Mitroff, 49). While user information stays safe and irretrievable, Facebook also must have the back-up server complete with information and machinery ready to revive the load and resume normal website activities. In order to keep security of back-up data and software high, Facebook must use similar security questions based strategies that cancel out the chances of vulnerability of the social networking site during the breakdown. Conclusion: Facebook is a portal that has 1.4 million users worldwide sharing their thoughts, photos and videos today. The responsibility of maintaining the security of these updates and maintaining the standard of services at highly accurate levels should be the topmost priority for Facebook authorities. The platform has pioneering big data and privacy policy applications that users get to benefit from. However, “The most common strategy for privacy protection—decreasing profile visibility through restricting access to friends—is also a very weak mechanism; a quick fix rather than a systematic approach to protecting privacy. Most users do not seem to realize that restricting access to their data does not sufficiently address the risks resulting from the amount, quality and persistence of the data they provide. (Debatin et al 107)” All Facebook needs to do presently is incorporate the above mentioned crisis management strategies to increase the standards of the platform and win user confidence maximally. References: Debatin et al, Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, (2009) 15. 1,  83–108 Magnesi, Jennifer, Flitsch, Emily & Stephen E. Brock. “Social Media and Crisis Prevention and Intervention”. CASP Convention. (2012) Accessed on 14th November, 2014 from: http://www.csus.edu/indiv/b/brocks/Workshops/CASP/Social%20Media%20CASP.pdf Mitroff, Ian I., Paul Shrivastava, and Firdaus E. Udwadia. "Effective crisis management." The Academy of Management Executive 1.4 (1987): 283-292. Pearson, Christine M., and Ian I. Mitroff. "From crisis prone to crisis prepared: A framework for crisis management." The academy of management executive7.1 (1993): 48-59. Symeoun, Chris “Essential Elements of Crisis Prevention: Social Media Monitoring”. CKSyme Media Group. (2014). 14th November, 2014 from: http://cksyme.com/essential-elements-crisis-prevention-social-media-monitoring/ Syme, Chris “How to Rate Social Media Loyalty Strategies for Crisis Prevention”. EDUniverse. (2012) Accessed on 14th November, 2014 from: http://eduniverse.org/how-rate-social-media-loyalty-strategies-crisis-prevention Read More