What impact does social media have on public relations practices, particularly crisis communications and reputation management? How significant is it for organizations today to monitor content on social media sites, including hash tags and other signs of internal and external dialogue?

Social media in today world is the fastest mode of communication globally. It has it’s pros and cons specially in today’s time social media is used as a disruptive mode of communication as it allows users to participate and have their input, no matter what the conversation is about. Ocassionally , this disrupts one sided conversations and can take the communication in another direction. Within minutes particularly any negative communication reaches the world. It provides ordinary people with the ability to become the main players in framing and constructing crisis communication hampering the goodwill of an organization. It can create large scale crisis which otherwise would have faded without the exsistence of social media. Social media has the possibility of having the problem doubled as there is always a tendency to overeact and stretch the issue causing an uncertainity in the minds of the masses and the company’s stakeholders ,employees and other associates dealing with the organisations. It can create a spark among people leading to aggression ,agitation and violence as well in an organization and outside creating more activists ,journalists and more compietitors for the organization .
Monitoring the social media sites and their conversation is very important specially to know the effect the crisis communication has on the mind of the masses and how it could affect the business. For example, with the number of re tweets, one can analyze the data and see the effect of the crisis communication and take a counter measure to handle the situation and further restructure