Chapter 8 Social Media

Some of the most popular web-site on the Internet are social media sites that not only draws maximum amount of web-traffic but users tend to spend also significant amount of time on those sites. Social media has transformed the mode of business tremendously. The various ways firms conduct businesses and consumers consume and experience products and services are greatly influenced by this technological revolution.

Social media is platform for online social network where nodes are users and connection (or ties) between these users are social in nature.

Using social media can give firms tremendous business advantage. However, social media differs from traditional marketing channels and firms should be cognizant of the pit falls of using it for their own advantage. Therefore following are some of the social media strategies that firm should follow:

Listen First, Act Second: Consumers primarily use social sites as a means of personal communication with friends and family. A marketer from a company may be regarded initially as an outsider to a certain extent. Carefully and patiently allow consumers to speak to and about the company before entering the conversation.
Engage and then Interact: Firms should first try to engage consumers in their products and services. Once this engagement has been established then they should start interacting with them keeping in mind their interests and preferences.
Nurture Customer Relationships Through Social Media: Firms must carefully manage and devise opportunities to create and nurture relationships with customers through the social medium. For example, maintaining a user-friendly social media site interface, providing regular updates about events, sending personalized messages to individual customers, and encouraging member contributions can create interactive communication that can enhance firm equity.
Be Wary; Not All Customers are Created Equal: Managers need to understand that not all customers will have a similar response to the firm’s social media efforts. It is vital that managers integrate their knowledge about customers from both offline transactions and online social media sources in order to better serve them.
Create Product Based Social Media Forums: Managers can increase the response to social media participation by creating specialized subcommunities or discussion forums for customers looking for premium and unique products.
Awareness->Listening->Purchase->Advocacy:
- Attention, Reach, Engagement, Sentiment
- Understand and quantify the list of social media followers
- Web-traffic, email opt-in, purchase
- Building advocacy to keep up with the changing requirement of users.

There are several advantages of using social media for marketing. Some of the advantages of social media over traditional marketing channels are :

One-way vs. Two-way communication
Minimizing wasted efforts
Ability to target specific segment of consumers
Formation of brand communities around ideas and commonalities, regardless of physical location of their members.
It creates a unique marketing channel that enables Paid, Earned and Owned Media to be leveraged to create a virtuous cycle of brand impact. For example, Brands use display ads and other paid media (Paid) to attract Fans to the Brand Page (Owned), which serves as a platform for marketing communications that reach Fans and Friends of Fans (Earned) in the News Feed and other sections of the web-site.

8.2 Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is one of the costless marketing tools to spread marketing messages (Word of Mouth - WoM) to larger audience.

Word of Mouth: Word of Mouth (WoM) is the sharing of information about a product, promotion etc. between a consumer and a friend, colleague or other acquaintance. A related concept is eWoM where information is transmitted among users using electronic medium such as social media, email, blog etc.

Viral Marketing: Viral marketing is defined as eWoM whereby some form of marketing message related to a company, brand, or product is transmitted in an exponentially growing way - often through the use of social media applications.

There are thee conditions required for achieving viral marketing:

Messenger: Market mavens, social hubs, and salespeople
Message: Memorable and interesting that creates attention
Medium: That supports exponential spread of message

Social media are ideal platforms for identifying correct messenger (eg., influential) and have wider reach thereby making it an ideal medium for propagating messages that may create maximum exposure and greater attention.

Chapter 8 Social Media

8.1 Planning for Social Media

8.2 Viral Marketing