Social Media Marketing

Source: Evans (2008)


Desribing social media marketing is not easy. Although there are a number of books and articles published, I had difficulties summarizing the concept of social media marketing. Personally, I found the book by David Evans (Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day) very useful.

Evans summarizes that social media marketing “involves a natural, genuine conversation between people about something of mutual interest, a conversation built on the thoughts and experiences of the participants. It is about sharing and arriving at a collective point, often for the purpose of making a better or more-informed choice.”

From this description it becomes clear that the main task of social media marketing comprises to encourage conversations by creating ‘talk-worthy’ events that result in word of mouth. The WOMMA defines word of mouth as “the most honest form of marketing, building upon people's natural desire to share their experiences with family, friends, and colleagues”. This sort of conversation can spring naturally through the so-called organic word of mouth, or companies can enhance it through ‘talk-worthy’ campaigns that foster the buzz, which is called amplified word of mouth. In my opinion applified word of mouth is the main objective of social media marketing. Another social media marketing author, Larry Weber, describes two tasks in his book Marketing to the social web: how digital customer communities build your business how amplified word of mouth can be created:

1. by creating customer experiences consumers would want and talk about, and
2. by participating in various social media services to take part in the conversations about a company

Based on the concept of this word of mouth, Evans Social Feedback Cycle (above) illustrates how this could generate in higher sales. Evans used the purchasing funnel model, explaining how consumers purchase products and services steered through marketing activities, and extended the funnel to include post purchase experiences of the overall marketing process. These post purchase experiences are generated by the user of the product, leading him or her to form an opinion and talk about it. Subsequently, this ‘talk’, influences the consideration of purchase of potential other buyers.

A very interesting McKinsey study showed that social media marketing oversimplified said results in 25% increased awareness, 19% higher consideration of purchases, 17% greater conversions from online registrations to actual purchases, and 30% higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

From this point of view, social media marketing looks like a benefical instrument to market a company and ist products, if done rightly ...

Social Media Marketing Books

For my thesis research I found so far a couple of books quite useful, which I don’t want to keep back:

Dave Evans – Social Media Marketing: An hour a day
He manages to explain the social media phenomenon clearly and provides useful steps to examine the different social media platforms. However, what I would have wished were more hands-on guide on how to finally implement the tools and social media strategy.

Charlene Li ad Josh Bernoff – Groundswell: Winning in a world transformed by social technologies
Both authors provide a very useful overview of various social media strategies and which social media channels can be used for which strategy (e.g. listening to the crowd, responding, energizing etc.)

Larry Weber – Marketing to the social web: How digital customer communities build your business
Although Weber mainly concentrates on online communities, he explains the emergence of the Web 2.0 very clearly.

Other books recommended to me include:

• Paul Gillin - Secrets of social media marketing : how to use online conversations and customer communities to turbo-charge your business
• Paul Gillin - New influencers : a marketer's guide to the new social media
• Tracy Tuten - Advertising 2.0 : social media marketing in a Web 2.0 world
• David M. Scott - New rules of marketing and PR : how to use news releases, blogs, podcasting, viral marketing, & online media to reach buyers directly

Social Media

As can be seen in the video, social media became an increasing trend. I can imagine that many marketers, for instance, recognize the Youtube video posted above. Therefore, the businesses shouldn’t shy away from it. Many companies start using social media activities to listen to customers, engage with customers, and, thus, increase the company’s awareness and customers’ loyalty. To examine this trend, I will use my old blog to post interesting insights of books and academic articles I found during my research for my Master thesis.

I picked this topic, as I think it is not only a fad, but offers new potentials for companies to put themselves in their consumers’ shoes and grow beyond what they have been capable of in the past. Dell, Lego, P&G, Dove or Linux are all good examples for this new potential. Personally, I hope to learn more about social media and the possibilities they offer.

Crowdsourcing

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Jeff Howe describes Crowdsourcing as the “act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call”. Basically, this means that customers, or interest groups, are involved online in the entire process of a product or service from the development to marketing (Hannestreichl).

However, crowdsourcing does only work, if a company is willing to involve customers, and interest groups into their processes. Some companies have an own R&D department that takes care of the development of products and resources. They might be less willing to ask customers for ideas and solutions (Hannestreichl).

A good example for crowdsourcing is the global online network InnoCentive. InnoCentive stands for “global web community for open innovation, enabling scientists, engineers, professionals and entrepreneurs to collaborate to deliver breakthrough solutions for innovative R&D-driven organizations.” Those specialists meet in the online community to solve various problems, delivering innovative problem solutions. Another example is Wikipedia, where everyone can publish and share information with an online community.

Personally, I never heard the term “crowdsourcing” before. However, it seems to be an interesting and innovative approach to involve customers into the product development process; not only via market research, or market analysis, but by active participation. The potential for companies to find innovative and creative ideas and solutions for the business seems very strong. Thus, companies using this relatively new approach can gain a high competitive advantage.

Search engine advertising and search engine optimising

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Everyone using search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Ask regularly experiences search engine advertisements (SEA). And they fulfil a valuable task for companies that pay for those placements: SEAs guarantee unknown and unpopular web pages a high visitor rate, and can even be applied target-group specific (Gladior).

Paid listings have been commonplace since 2001. However, SEA includes more than that (SearchEngineWatch.com):

1. Paid Inclusion: a site owner pays a fee in order to have web pages included in a search engine's editorial listings

2. Paid Sumission of a web page

3. Content Promotion: engines will promote an advertiser's content on search results pages

4. Banner ads

SEAs, therefore, have different terms, including “sponsored listings,” “paid search ads,” "pay for placement," "pay for performance," "CPC listings" (cost-per-click) and "PPC listings" (pay per click) (SearchEngineWatch.com).

Due to the advantages SEAs bring, search engine optimisation (SEO) is very important. Already a lot of online companies discovered that need of SEO and offer to optimise the the process of traffic to a web site from search engines. However, the promise to ensure top rankings in search engines to clients, like for instance Weprofits does, seems farfetched.

I would say that a company can optimize its web site, and, thus, search results already through a search engine friendly site design and architecture. However, consultation in this rather new form of advertising seems reasonable. In my opinion, the new media will increase in importance for company representation every year. Thus, the presence in the internet, and new forms of advertising need to be used in order to gain a competitive advantage on the long-run.

Social media and public relations

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As Lee le Fever (see video) explains, social media is for the people by the people. Everyone has the chance to have a say nowadays, using free tools such as blogs, pod casts or video sharing. And there are new opportunities for real people to play a role and provide feedback, organization and promotion. In brief, social media means new opportunities to create and communicate with people that care.

Social media incorporate a variety of platforms and media including social networks, blogs, or image and video sharing. And people make more and more use of it, either individually, or within companies (Online marketing Blog). Already a great number of companies, such as HP, makes use of social media activities, like social media marketing campaigns or social media newsrooms. HP even conducts Social Media Research in order to observe large groups of consumers to find out on what buying behavior depends (Social Media Research with HP Labs).

However, Brian Solis makes raises awareness to the fact that social media is also about people, not about a new marketing tool to analyze potential target groups in order to improve products and services. Again relationship building is important to serve the needs of the people a company wants to reach.

From the business perspective, I think that social media is a very useful tool to build up relationships with public groups, which serves both sites. On the one hand, people take an influence in the company’s operations and can help to design products and services they would value. On the other hand, companies receive feedback from ordinary people, or (potential) customer, and, thus, gain a competitive advantage through developing customer-specific products and services. All in all a win-win situation.

Microblogging in PR work

Twitter

Microblogging seems to be a rather new form of pitching short messages and photos to a targeted group of people to keep them updated. According to Wikipedia micro-blogging is “a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips”. The messages can be then viewed publicly, or by a restricted group.

One of the most successful tools regarding PR work seems to be Twitter. Originally, a tool to connect family, friends and co-workers, it serves nowadays as a device to share and discover new information among PR professionals. According to Brian Solis, published author on marketing and engagement, twitter is the ultimate “new channel for casual conversation as well as a full-blown broadcast network for breaking news as it happens”.

The principle is very simple. When registered in the system, people can start writing short messages within 140 characters, saying what they are doing at the moment. This post will be published publicly on a wall so that everyone can answer.

However, when looking at the list of posts published, one can loose the overview easily. With a number of 340.000 users (Twitter Facts), and about 2.5 million people visiting the page each month (Brian Solis), new messages are published every few seconds. Thus, one has to check new postings regularly to be updated.

Personally, I prefer Facebook to be in contact with my family and friends. It offers as well a huge amount of possibilities to share messages (short and long), photos, or videos. Furthermore, I can keep those people updated, which I have as friends, as it is important for me to have my privacy. However, I see that PR professionals have a different perspective on such tools as Facebook or Twitter. If I might start a career in PR, or journalism, I will consider to use Twitter as a tool for PR work.