Social Media Crisis Communications: Preparing for, Preventing, and Surviving a Public Relations #Fail

2. The Social Platforms

Woven into the Cultural Fabric

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Google+. Can you imagine life without them? Hard, isn’t it? Although these social platforms are less than a decade old, they are engrained in our culture as a means to interact. We’ve become very dependent on them to communicate in everyday life.

Social networking can be traced back to the late 1970s, when the first email was shared and bulletin board systems (BSSs) were created to distribute data over phone lines. GeoCities, founded in 1994, could be credited as being the web’s first true social networking site where users could create their own websites. AOL Instant Messenger was launched in 1997. Launched in 2002, Friendster allowed friends ...