Factors that Influence the Success of Social Media Efforts - Essay Example

The community became more aware of the events happening in the world, which resulted in the occurrence of “citizen journalism” and blogs when people can freely express their opinions on political, economic, and social events.

Different strategic approaches have been used in the cases of the Haiti earthquake in January 2010 and VinayandSameer.org campaign in 2007-2008. The table below shows the similarities and differences of their approaches.

While planned strategy presumes clear direction, stability, and alignment, emergent strategy means innovation and adaptability as a reaction to a new prospect or a threat. It is rather hard to say which one is better since it always depends on the situation and its objectives. In the case of Vinay and Sameer, for instance, the planned macro- and micro-mobilization strategies have been used to reach 20,000 South Asian American registrants at the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) to find donor matches for Vinay and Sameer diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML).

It seemed impossible to reach their goal if they did not use the planned strategy with different approaches and social media tools like television, AML educational videos, widgets, blogs, web links, e-mails, Facebook, etc. On the contrary, in the case of the Haiti earthquake, there was no time to plan any strategy to save people’s lives, help them to find each other, and spread the news about the horrible event in Haiti. The emergent social media strategy seems the only available and correct decision at that time because the normal communications channels have been down. Under those conditions, user-generated content played an important role in spreading the news about the Haiti earthquake.

If to compare both cases, it is possible to say that emergent social media might be effective (a) to cover unexpected situations like earthquakes, water floods or other natural disasters, political rebels, terrorist attacks, etc; and (b) in short-term information exchange, news spreading and coverage of the hot events. It is a spontaneous process of getting and sharing information and news, which is not planned or controlled by anyone. Read More