Part 1: Write a post for the internal company blog that advises employees on how to respond appropriately when they are representing the company online.
Provide an appropriate amount of background on the problem, and outline the repercussions for the unacceptable behavior.
Part 2: Write an informative statement that will be posted to the company's Facebook Official Welcome Page that addresses the comments made on the page for customers to vent their frustrations.
In the post, remind followers of the company's mission and slogan.
Encourage customers to visit the page and continue to express their frustrations.
Part 3: Write a cover memo to the professor justifying your posts.
Use exact quotes and examples to demonstrate how you solved the problem and professionally represented the company.
The Case | Employees who take pride in their work are a practically priceless resource for any business.
However, pride can sometime manifest itself in a negative ways when employees come under criticism- and public criticism is a fact of life in social media.
Your company, Tech Works, is a leading manufacturer of innovative technological classroom products.
Once run out of the garage of the founder’s house, Tech Works has grown to an international leader in its field.
Tech Works prides itself on its high quality products and ability to maintain successful customer approval and satisfaction.
Since the company was built on humble beginnings, the CEO wants to ensure that Tech Works does not loose its personable relationships with its consumers as it expands to a broader market base.
The company slogan “Engaging Innovation for Tomorrow’s Classrooms,” demonstrates the core principles the company aims to stand by; maintain engaging relationships with the consumers by producing the most innovative technologies.
Tech Works has recently experienced a rash of product quality problems, and these problems have generated some unpleasant and occasionally unfair criticism on a variety of the company’s social media sites.
Someone even set up a Facebook and Twitter page specifically to give customers a place to vent their frustrations.
Some of the comments posted are:
“Tech Works does not care about quality, they only care about stealing from our school’s wallets!”
“Tech Works should stop trying to create products for tomorrow and start worrying about the products that do not even work in today’s classrooms!”
“I’d rather go back to chalk and erasers than use another Tech Works product in my classroom!”
As the Social Media Coordinator for Tech Works, you and the public relations team jumped into action, responding to complaints with offers to provide replacement products and help customers who have been affected by the quality problems.
Everything seemed to be going as well as could have been expected, and chatter on the social media pages seemed to die down, until you discovered that a few of the engineers in your company’s product design lab had been responding to the complaints on their own.
They identified themselves as company employees and defended their product design, blaming the company’s production department and even criticizing several customers for lacking the skills to use such sophisticated products.
Within a matter of minutes, you see the harsh comments made by the engineers being re-tweeted and reposted on multiple social networking sites, only fueling the fire of negative feedback against your company.
Needless to say, as the Social Media Coordinator, you are horrified.
You manage to reach the engineers by private message and tell them to stop posting messages, but you realize you have a serious training issue on your hands.
Your goal is to figure out how to convey your message so that the internal and external audiences will listen and take the action that you, the social media coordinator, desire and to represent yourself and the company in social media spheres.

Part 1: Write a post for the internal company blog that advises emp...