The point I make is that; as you say, a corporate mess up is just that, yet we all make mistakes. The focus is therefore not to shy away from acknowledging the mistake (particularly when catastrophic) but to engage with the criticism and enable your ‘audience’ to voice their anger, frutration or whatever and show respect for this voice by responding positively and proactively. An action that all 3 failed to take.

In each of these cases a powerful lobby group was thus enabled to voice their (biased?)critique via every media forum without proper response or acknowledgement, only by defensive and reactive tactics. Tactics which clearly failed.

Social Media defies rhetoric and ‘spin’ (from either an attacking or defensive perspective) and that is a large part of its power. Therefore enabling a proper debate on the reality of the emotions, facts and issues. Again, in each of these cases, I would contend, these have not been clearly presented from a balanced perspective, to the ‘audience’. Albeit, that does not ‘excuse’ the original misdemeanour or try to justify it in any way. Rather, it provides the opportunity to establish a better balanced perspective and also to demonstrate real concern for corrective action and reparation.

I therefore disagree that managers and business reputations can hide behind PR ‘fluffers’. Social Media actually enables Corporate Social Responsibility in a manner that is far more powerful than any legislation.

Regarding your final comment on ‘frivolities’; I absoultely agree …. we have yet another example appearing on our TV screens over the last week …. Vote on a BT website to decide the outcome of the next stage of an ongoing TV Ad saga …. ‘Tripe’! …. I am much more interested to let BT Openreach know that their ‘broadband’ service stinks and they should use their copper ‘infrastructure’ to pull through fibre optic cable so as to enable the delivery of real (20MB+) broadband to every door ……… and then go make pots and pans with ‘their’ copper ‘waste’ … thats what a real social media campaign should be telling them about their product and service development!

Finally, thank you for engaging in this debate … the more veiwpoints and arguments that are presented on Social Media, the more polished and potent will be its use and deployment. I therefore emphasise that these are my personal views and recognise that within an emotional environment there will be conflicting arguments and perspectives …. such is the nature of Social Media.

You give the example of the Catholic Church. How do you think Social Media could have helped them prevent the child abuse scandals being so damaging?

As for today’s wikileaks debate; the white house and our own government are trying to engage with voters via social media all the time. I can’t see how they could have prevented or softened this damage using any on-line techniques.

Ultimately, a corporate mess up is a corporate mess up. If their public Social Media face is friendly and their private face is evil, that is not going to prevent fall out from any negative revelations about the company. To the public, the social media will just seem like another shield protecting the bosses in the same way as when you can never get through to a manager when you call to complain about a service. It will just be PR fluffers manning the fort on Twitter and Facebook, not those with responsibility.

Social Media works against unethical business practises because it gives the public power to protest with a few button clicks. Which is great for the public, but I can’t see how it can soften negative revelations about a business. (In fact, I’ve seen it damaging far more companies reputations than used for damage limitation – this month alone Gillian McKeith and Dr Pepper have been stung by bad use of social media and they will have giant advertising budgets)

Surely the people power of social media just means that if a company is behaving dishonestly, they are less likely to get away with it. Surely taking responsibility for their own actions and behaving ethically is the only way of preventing this – so they have nothing to hide, not engaging with the public in frivolities.