Discuss social media content and channels currently being used by an organization of your choice. Relate this to some of the overall implications for PR.

So, to contribute to this discussion I’m selecting Unilever as my “organisation of choice”, one because they are a global high profile company so should have lots to analyse and two because I recently applied for a placement with them, thus have some knowledge of how they run. Firstly a couple of basic facts; created in 1930 Unilever is the amalgamation of British soap maker Lever Brothers and Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie. They are responsible for brands such as Marmite, Ben & Jerrys, Vaseline, Persil and a whole lot more.  In 2009 they employed over 163,000 people and currently their products are sold in 170 countries. To first asses the media content used by Unilever I turned to their website, on their home page is a clearly signposted "news and media" section. So far things are looking positive. Until we realize however that most of the news is dated 2009 with a single press release from 2010. Mistake me if i am wrong but we are now in 2011, and i struggle to believe that in a company so large nothing has happened in the last four months! In fact when we leave the confines of the company website and search elsewhere i instantly found and article in the The Telegraph discussing the rising costs of palm oil and petrochemicals thats is effecting the Unilever share price, dated 4th Fec 2011! Before critiquing Unilever for being out of date, we must look at their other forms of social media, and their Twitter page. Here we see a success for "Unilever Press" have 3,458 followers and daily tweets giving an insightful view of Unilver and constant update and links to relevant news. Coon (2010) describes the importance of Twitter to businesses, however does this raise in social media eradicate 

the need to maintain a relevant website? When searching for a business do the new generation now turn to Twitter and Facebook before the main site? I know when looking for information during my application process i personally found the Unilever tweets a great help, they were relevant, personal and contained content not directly written by Unilever providing the advantage of third party endorsement. As for blogging and facebook however we see a lost opportunity with no direct corporate blog or maintained facebook, after seeing the success of their Twitter page we wonder why not capitalise on all forms of social media?

In seminar discussions however i expressed my views of fashion power house Giorgio Armani having a twitter page  and how i believe it to be tacky for an exclusive brand to be open to such mass media. Now obviously Unilever is not exclusive but is it personal? Do the general public know who Unilever are? Or care? From my "pre-PR" days I'm going to say no. But it is in fact their products which are personal to an audience, highlighted beautifully by the Ben & Jerrys Facebook page (as shown below) which has 114,568 "likes" and a stream of conversation between the page and its fans. 

We can see both success and failure by Unilver in regards to social media but we must consider the appropriateness of social media and who are audiences want to communicate with and how Unilever in fact promote successfully through specific brands as oppose to a cold global company.