Power of Social media and its discontents.

                             #FeesMustFall campaign.

#FeesMustFall campaign is a student led protest movement that began in mid-October 2015 in response to an increase in fees at South African universities .CNNArticle Thanks to the power of social media, the South African students' grievances were heard, had it not been for the social media effective usage by the students for this #feesmustfall campaign probably the fees might have gone up as they usually do each year.
As it is already known and might have been expected universities of South Africa were reluctant to addressing the students' grievances but due to the controversial twitter posts
 surrounding this #feesmustfall campaign many were left with little choice but to succumb to this student grievance or otherwise it would have tarnished their corporate brand names of which most are very reputable names such as Wits University whose student leaders are the initiators of this campaign, University of  Cape Town, University of Johannesburg to mention but a few Universities' response.
Now my fellow Practitioners try to picture this kind of controversial campaign back in the 90's, would it have proved fruitful as it has now in the age of  digital media? Probably not, because first of all this campaign would't have been known to such a vast audience and secondly its impact wouldn't have had such far reaching effects in the whole world like it has become.
Lots of the big organizations joint forces with students, particularly the opposition political parties like Democratic Alliance Student Organization (DASO) and Economic Freedom Fighter Student Organization (EFFSO) through this campaign these organizations were able to tweet and voice out their discontents towards the ruling party which is African National Congress (ANC)EFF's take on the campaign  No matter how powerful and great the social media is, like many other existing things it has both advantages and disadvantages. One of the well-known short comings of  the social media is that whenever a post is made about a serious matter on a social media campaign, some people would take advantage of commenting nasty things that are either irrelevant or just plain allegations about an organization to the post this often causes messages to be misinterpreted due to people who might want to sabotage the whole social media campaign or tarnish the image of an organization, this is known as word of mouth (WOM) whereby people say whatever they want about an organization. There is a defense against this inevitable short coming however! Organizations can reply truthfully to any allegations made about them by people who are using word-of-mouth opinions or if they are indeed at fault try to resolve the issue in a most diplomatic and civilized way they can so as to regain credibility, just like other universities have made to this #FeesMustFall campaign University amnesty statements.