D Communication Guide Dec. 2013 | Page 10

New stakeholder paradigm. Managing stakeholders has always been about securing corporate operations in the sense that unsatisfied stakeholders might endanger business in many different ways. Examples here might be a state licensing agency unsatisfied with business certifications or practices shutting down the company. However, this is far from the only way stakeholders may act. What is meant by this is that people are more likely to believe information their friends or peers share than information coming from official sources. Thus, stakeholder management taken a turn to a change. has Today companies need to rethink their whole strategy and instead of thinking in terms of important and not important stakeholders they need to focus on Nowadays a good example of stakeholder adverse actions are the many Social Media-driven anti -branding campaigns, often based on a single negative experience. This puts stakeholder management into a completely different perspective. What before were considered dangerous stakeholders were in most cases a handful. Today basically anybody can become dangerous given that certain factors as Social Media user reactions turn an individual claim into a full-blown campaign. Additional word of warning here is that even if regular users do not naturally react upon such individual claims there are enough of a company’s competitors out there who will make sure that the story reaches as many as possible. Last but not least, a socially driven campaign is in all cases deserving attention as its potential is unlimited. 10