Ten Rules for Dealing with Negative Contributions in Social Media

Social media is becoming a key part of business communication strategy. Despite all the ad-vantages, social media also poses a threat to business reputation. Dissatisfied customers can reach a large audience and share their negative experiences with others. This paper deals with the impact of social media on the practice of public relations. The goal of the paper is to for-mulate a set of rules for dealing with negative contributions and generally with crisis commu-nication in social media. It is based on two surveys. Individual interviews with social media experts are the core part of the analysis. They are complemented by questioning of consumers to get deeper insight into complaining behavior via social media. The defined set of rules pro-vides a useful tool for the social media crisis management.