Download Social Media

Social Media
GOALS
TERMS
• Describe how social media differs from traditional
social media, p. xxiv
media, including its advantages and disadvantages.
blog, p. xxv
• Identify real-world examples of marketers effectively
social network, p. xxv
using social media to reach customers.
crowd-sourcing, p. xxvi
Even if you don’t know the exact definition of the term “social media,” you’ve
probably used social media before. There’s a good chance you use it almost every
day. Social media is a relatively new phenomenon, but it has become so popular in
recent years that it’s hard to imagine a world without it. In its short existence, social
media has revolutionized the way we live our lives, the way we connect with each
other, and the way we do business. Social media can be used as a tool, as entertainment, or just as a way to stay in touch with old friends.
What Is Social Media?
S
©BRIGETTE SULLIVAN/PHOTOEDIT
ocial media is any web-based or
mobile media technology that connects people in a way that enables twoway communication. It combines a basic
How many forms of social media do you
regularly use?
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human desire—to be social, to connect
with other people—with a new human
innovation—digital technology. Simply
put, social media uses technology to allow
people to have conversations. Social media
can take the form of blogs, social networks, discussion boards, video or photo
sharing websites, wikis, product reviews,
even online games.
Traditional media has a one-way flow
of information. Content is broadcast to a
mass audience who receives the information. With social media, the process does
not stop there. Social media allows the
receiver of the message to comment on
the content, share it with friends, add to
it, and redefine it. If you’ve ever forwarded
a funny email or written a blog entry or
posted a comment for an online video,
you’ve taken part in this process. It may
seem like a small thing, but your comment
actually is content. It shapes the way other
people will view the information. Furthermore, while most content in traditional
Traditional Media
Message
Company
Audience
Social Media
Feedback
Message
Company
Sharing
Audience
FIGURE 1
What are the major differences you notice between traditional and social media? How might this
affect how quickly a message spreads?
media is generated by a central source such
as a studio or publisher, most social media
content is created by the audience. For example, the videos on the website YouTube
aren’t created by YouTube. They’re created
by millions of users all around the world
to be shared with those same millions
of users. That’s why content on social
media websites is often referred to as usergenerated content.
Types of Social Media
T
Micro-blogging, or posting very short
updates such as on the popular website
Twitter, is one type of a blog.
Blogs The term “blog” is a blend of the
words “web log.” It is typically a website
where one person regularly posts commentary, descriptions, or other content,
and an audience can comment on it.
Social Networks Social networks, like
here are several common types of social
media, although not all social media
falls neatly into one of these categories.
Facebook, are websites that link people or
organizations into communities based on
common interests, goals, or beliefs. Social
networks typically allow a user to create
Social Media
xxv
a profi le that identifies him- or herself
within that digital community.
Collaboration The Internet makes it easy
for large groups of people to collaborate
on a single project. When thousands of
people each contribute a small amount of
work or knowledge, they have the ability
to collectively achieve something massive.
This large-scale collaboration is sometimes
called crowd-sourcing. The online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is one example of this.
Content Communities Some social
media create communities around specific
types of media content: Youtube for videos, Flickr for photography, and Pandora
for music are just a few examples. Many
of these sites feature user-generated
content.
Reviews and Opinions Some websites,
such as epinions.com, exist specifically to
allow users to share reviews of products
and services with other users. This form
of social media has become standard
on many retail and content sites as well.
Amazon.com, for example, primarily
sells physical products online, but it also
encourages users to post reviews of those
products. Similarly, the movie-viewing
website Netflix allows users to write
reviews of the movies they watch.
Entertainment Online games such as
Second Life and The Sims Online have
evolved to incorporate elements of social
media. Participants can create profi les,
interact with each other, and share information in digital environments that are
sometimes incredibly sophisticated.
In reality, social media is typically a
blend of these types. New forms and applications of social media are constantly
being developed and evolving. And social
media platforms are becoming more and
more integrated. For example, a person
might post a photo on his or her Flickr
account, and that automatically posts to a
Facebook page and sends out a message via
Twitter.
When a new type of social media
emerges, the best aspects of it are often
adopted while the less useful elements are
discarded. To understand how current
formats came about, it might be helpful to
review a brief history of social media.
A Brief History of Social Media
T
he growth of social media is unprecedented in the history of humankind.
Never before has a type of media
spread so rapidly and had such a large
impact. But where did social media come
from and when did it start?
In 1971, in a lab in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, a computer engineer sent
a message from his computer to another
computer in that same room. The message
read: “QWERTYUIOP” (look at the top line
of letters on your keyboard and you’ll see
why). Although it didn’t seem like much,
this simple message was the birth of email.
The late 1970s saw the rise of BBS, or
bulletin board systems. The BBS was the
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digital equivalent of a physical bulletin
board—a location where users could post
messages for others to read. Around the
same time, the first web-browsers appeared.
These software programs allowed users to
navigate the information on this new network. The network wasn’t nearly as widespread or sophisticated as it is today, but it
was an early version of today’s Internet.
These early forms of social media really began to take root and grow in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, thanks to the
increasing popularity of the personal
computer. Now people could connect with
one another from their own homes and
offices. Instant messengers allowed people
BLEND IMAGES/JUPITER IMAGES
to “chat” online, sending real-time instant
messages back and forth in a format that
resembled an actual conversation.
In 1997, the website Sixdegrees.com
allowed users to create personal profiles
and list acquaintances, a precursor to the
launch of Friendster.com five years later.
Friendster was the first widely popular
social networking site that encouraged
people to connect with real-world friends
online, then meet new friends through
those contacts. MySpace and Facebook
followed in subsequent years, eclipsing
Friendster’s success (although Friendster
still maintains over 115 million users, predominantly in Asia).
Micro-blogging caught on with the
launch of Twitter in 2006. Twitter allows
users to send short, 144-character messages, known as “tweets,” to other users
who have chosen to follow them. While
Twitter seemed like a straight-forward
communication tool at first, it has been
used in a variety of creative ways—users
tweet everything from what they had
for lunch to links to interesting articles
or websites. News organizations tweet
headlines, and people have used Twitter
to post “on-the-ground” updates from
events. Some companies have even used
Twitter as a customer service tool, answering their customers’ questions and
concerns.
In recent years, sociability, or the
inclusion of one or more aspects of social
media, has become a standard on websites, even those that exist primarily for
other purposes, such as retail. Companies
have realized that adding social media
How does mobile technology affect how we use
social media?
functionality to their websites is often the
key to successful growth.
As new forms of social media are
developed, they are often quickly adopted
by existing websites. For example, mobile
technology has introduced real-world
geography into the equation. Foursquare,
Facebook, and photo-sharing sites such as
Flickr, allow for geo-tagging, or the use of
GPS-enabled mobile devices to add a location to posts on social media platforms. For
example, if a customer goes into a restaurant, they might “check in” on Foursquare,
which posts their location to a website for
others to see and comment on. Store and
restaurants sometimes give incentives such
as discounts to people who check in from
their establishment (after all, these checkins are essentially a form of free advertising
for the business). What was once a strictly
digital media format is finding more and
more application in the physical world.
The Amazing Case of Facebook
N
o discussion of social media can be
complete without acknowledging the
enormous impact that the social networking site Facebook has had on not just
social media, but on how people all around
the world share information. Facebook’s
rise to prominence has been staggering
and illustrates the power of social media
to generate exponential growth for a
company.
Social Media
xxvii
In 2004, a group of Harvard students
launched Facebook, initially limiting it to
certain college campuses. Unlike previous social networking sites like Friendster
and MySpace that faded in popularity
after their introduction, Facebook shook
the trend by evolving and adapting to
consumer needs. Over the next seven
years, Facebook broke many of the assumptions about what a social networking
site was—that it was only for young people, that it only concerned frivolous social
interactions and trivial personal news, and
that it was of no use to serious companies.
In its evolution, Facebook has gone far
beyond a site where friends can share status updates and photos. It has also become
a powerful tool for brands to communicate
with existing customers and reach new
customers. Facebook allows a company
to have an active dialogue with customers
individually or as a group. It can monitor
the conversations and get a sense of what
they’re doing right and how they can improve their products or services.
On Facebook, people can have the same
interactions with brands as they do with
their friends, and forward-thinking brands
are taking advantage of this ability to connect with their customers. According to
their own Facebook pages, at the beginning
of 2011, Starbucks had over 19 million fans,
and Coca-Cola had over 22 million. Aside
from these impressive numbers, consider
this: when Coca-Cola sends out a message
to its Facebook fans, this is fundamentally
different than when it broadcasts a television commercial to 22 million people.
With a television commercial, some of the
audience might be engaged and open to the
message while others might not pay attention or care about it at all. On Facebook, on
the other hand, these are 22 million people
who have declared they like the brand and
want to receive messages from it. Therefore,
they are more likely to listen to it. This
FACEBOOK USER GROWTH (IN MILLIONS)
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FIGURE 2
Why do you think social media that “catches on” grows so quickly?
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Users
makes Facebook an incredibly powerful
marketing tool.
In 2010, Facebook overtook the
search engine Google as the most-visited
website in the world. It passed the mark
of 600 million active users and continues
to grow. Th is staggering number of users
makes Facebook an appealing medium
for marketers, but the fact that Facebook
is built of communities of people who
can converse and share easily is what
makes it revolutionary. Because digital
media evolves so quickly, these statistics
may be out-of-date by the time you read
these words. But by most predictions,
Facebook will continue to grow and continue to be a force in social media in the
years to come.
Social Media and Marketing
W
here there are people, there are
potential customers. But beyond
that, social media has some distinct
advantages over traditional media as a way
for companies to reach and build relationships with customers.
Social media is based on the concept
of community, and it is designed to make
the sharing of ideas very fast and easy. If
a marketer’s message is embraced by the
right communities, it can spread much
faster than it could via traditional media.
There are a couple reasons for this.
First, whereas physical communities
are based on location, social media communities are based on shared ideology,
interests, or beliefs. When one person in a
social media community is interested in a
company’s message, there’s a good chance
that others in that community will also be
interested. So the message is passed along
repeatedly, spreading through the community. Because it resembles the spread of
a disease, marketers often call this “viral
marketing” or simply “going viral.”
The second advantage social media has
over traditional media concerns the source
of the messages. Every day, we receive
messages from a wide variety of sources,
some we inherently trust more than others. For example, you would be more likely
to trust a music recommendation from a
friend who knows you and knows your
musical tastes than an advertisement in
a magazine. Likewise, your social media
connections are presumably people you
trust. So even if a message originates with
a marketer, if it is passed along to you by
a friend, you are more likely to trust it.
By passing it along to you, your friend is
endorsing the message and giving it more
importance.
Another advantage of social media to
marketers is that it allows for dialogue.
One might say that with traditional media,
marketers are talking at their audience.
With social media, however, marketers
have a conversation with their audience.
Marketers can use social media not only
to send a message about their product or
service, but to receive messages from their
customers, to answer customers’ questions,
and to conduct research that could aid in
product development.
With social media, marketers rely on
their audience members to share their
message with each other. Therefore,
marketers try to make it as easy as possible
for people to pass along their message by
adding social media functionality. This
might take the form of links to Facebook,
Twitter, or other social media sites. But
more important than that, marketers have
to create something that people want to
share—something that’s interesting, or entertaining, or useful. Content that people
share with each other is sometimes said to
have “talk value” or be “buzz worthy.” This
simply means that it’s interesting enough
for people to share it.
Social Media
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Some Creative Uses of Social Media
We live in a world that is full of messages in all
kinds of media, so it can be hard for marketers to get people to notice their message.
With social media, the challenge is even
more difficult. Not only do marketers want
their audience to notice their message, but
they want them to share it with others too.
Because of this, marketers have to be creative
about how they use social media so they can
stand out. Here are a few examples of creative
uses of social media in recent years.
Your Friend vs A Whopper In 2009,
Burger King launched a social media program
on Facebook called “Whopper Sacrifice.” They
gave a coupon for a free Whopper sandwich
to anyone who “de-friended” 10 of their
Facebook friends. Although the program
was quickly banned by Facebook, it gained
quite a bit of media attention for Burger
King, and it made a thought-provoking
statement about the value of our social
media “friends.”
Will it Blend? Blendtec is a company
that manufactures and sells blenders. It
might seem pretty hard to say something
interesting about a simple kitchen appliance, but in what has become an incredibly
successful social media campaign, Blendtec
demonstrates the power of their blenders in a
series of videos that ask “Will it blend?” In the
videos, they answer this question by putting
random objects into the blender, including golf balls, marbles, credit cards, cellular
phones, a camcorder, video games and, of
course, various foods.
The Man Your Man Could Smell
Like In 2010, Old Spice launched a popular
Social media can be a very powerful
tool, helping small companies achieve
great success seemingly overnight. But
it also has the power to wreak havoc on
a company’s well-planned marketing
campaign. With traditional media, marketers have full control over the message.
They can craft a commercial message
about their product and then broadcast
it to an audience. In traditional media,
all the power lies with the sender of the
message. Social media distributes power
more evenly. Every user has the power to
broadcast ideas. A marketer might send
a message through social media, but they
have no control over the conversations
that occur after that. Each member of the
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television commercial that featured a hunky
male actor. They followed up the success of
the commercial with a social media campaign that let people interact with the actor.
Through Twitter, fans could send the actor
questions. Then, over two days, the actor
responded to over 100 of these questions
with a series of funny, personalized videos
that were posted to Youtube for everyone
to see.
audience is free to agree or disagree and
then broadcast their own opinion. As
many marketers have found out, this lack
of control can be very damaging to their
brands. Marketers might spend millions
of dollars on advertising claiming that
their product is the greatest, but bad reviews by customers can quickly undo all
of that, and for no cost to the customer.
For this reason, marketers must have a
well thought-out approach to social media,
one that is truthful about their product or
service, and one that treats their customers
with respect. Because with social media,
marketers are no longer just talking at
their audience. They entering into a relationship with them.
The Future of Social Media
T
he concept behind social media is not
new. Word-of-mouth advertising, or
relying on your customers to spread the
word about your product or service, is the
oldest form of promotion. But what revolutionized word-of-mouth advertising and
continues to push it in exciting directions is
new digital technology that allow users to
connect more quickly, with more people, in
more places around the globe.
If there’s any doubt about the power
of social media, consider that Barack
Obama was, at the beginning of his 2008
presidential campaign, considered to be a
long shot. But his campaign team leveraged social media in a way that changed
political campaigns forever. It gave them
the ability to connect directly and inexpensively with voters without relying on
traditional media outlets. Obama’s team
could also react to his supporters and
respond quickly to news and issues. Their
innovative use of Facebook, Twitter, and
other social media platforms helped them
raise unprecedented campaign funds,
organize on a local level, combat smear
messages from their opponents, and
eventually defeat both Hillary Clinton in
the primaries and John McCain in the
national election.
It’s hard to understate the potential
of social media. In its short existence, it
has already helped build some of the biggest brands in the world, elect a president,
and lead to organized revolutions in some
countries. It is fundamentally changing the
way brands communicate with consumers
and the way people everywhere communicate with each other.
Social media probably won’t replace
traditional media. More likely, the two will
continue to be valuable tools as marketers figure out creative ways to use them
together. A social media campaign might be
used to enhance a traditional media campaign. A commercial might direct people
to a Facebook page to comment, or a movie
might be promoted with a mix of traditional trailers and a social media campaign.
As technology evolves, what social media
looks like will also change. While it’s nearly
impossible to predict the future, the central
principle behind social media—that people
will use technology to connect and build
communities with like-minded individuals—
looks like it has a very bright future.
Ongoing Social Media Study
S
ocial media has a wide range
of applications. In nearly
every aspect of marketing,
there is a role for social media to be used
as a tool. As you continue through this
textbook, you’ll find a special social media
icon at the beginning of each chapter.
These icons indicate that you should refer
to the chart on the following pages to find
the social media activity that corresponds
with that chapter.
As you have read in this section,
the social media environment changes
rapidly. It is constantly evolving, and
what is a popular website or technology one day may be long forgotten a few
months later. Therefore, many of the
social media activities ask for you to fi nd
current examples of social media and
analyze their application to marketing.
There’s rarely one correct answer, but it’s
important that you think about and share
your responses to these activities in the
context of your current environment—
in today’s exciting and ever-changing
world.
Social Media
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Social Media Activities
Chapter
xxxii
Page
Activity
1
2
Identify three specific ways that companies might use social media as a
tool to help them reach new customers, improve their products, or hire
new employees.
2
34
Explain how social media might compel a company to be more socially
responsible. Give an example of a company that was pressured to act
more responsibly due to pressure through social media.
3
58
Explain how social media might impact demand for a product or service. How would that change in demand affect the product’s price? How
else might social media impact the price of a product?
4
88
Give three examples of ways a company might use social media to
better understand its consumers.
5
120
Social media is one tool a company might use to research a market, but
explain how the research results might be skewed or biased if social
media is the only form of market research a company uses.
6
154
Write a short essay describing how you might make a decision about
what kind of television to purchase. Where do you get your information? Whose opinion do you most value? How might you use social
media to help with the decision?
7
180
List three ways a company might learn about its competition through
the use of social media.
8
208
List five products that could be sold entirely online. For each product,
describe how social media might be used to help promote the product
and increase sales.
9
236
Explain how social media might help a marketer define and then reach
a specific market segment. How could social media change how market
segments are defined by marketers?
10
274
Describe how a company might use social media to help develop a
product. Once a product is on the market, how can a company use
social media to improve that product?
11
306
Explain why social media can “make or break” a service company. How
could one bad review spread through social media affect sales at that
company?
12
328
List and explain two ways that the use of social media in business-tobusiness exchanges might be different than the use of social media in
business-to-consumer exchanges.
Social Media Activities
Chapter
Page
Activity
13
360
Describe a scenario in which social media is used in the distribution
phase of marketing. Imagine the entire process, from the ordering of
the product through the shipping to the final sale. How many uses of
social media can you think of for this process?
14
398
What impact can social media have on the price of a product or service? Give three examples of companies that use social media to give
discounts or coupons to their customers.
15
424
Give an example of negative or positive publicity for a company spreading through social media. Is there any difference between publicity that
spreads through social media and publicity that spreads through official
news sources like newspapers?
16
450
Give three examples of companies that successfully use social media to
promote their products or services. What advantages does social media
have over other forms of consumer promotion?
17
474
List three ways a salesperson might generate leads through social
media. Pretend you are a sales representative for a paper company. How
might you use social media?
18
504
Because the Internet allows people from all over the world to access the
same information about companies, communication intended for one market might be seen by people in a different market. What challenges does
this pose to a company? How can social media amplify these challenges?
19
530
Explain how a company might use social media to help identify competitive threats, evolving market trends, and developments in the
market that could pose a risk to their business.
20
554
What are the financial advantages and disadvantages of social media?
How might the role of social media be different between a company
with a big marketing budget and a company with a smaller budget?
21
584
How can social media be particularly useful to an entrepreneur starting
a new business? Explain how social media might “level the playing field”
and help a small start-up business compete with a large corporation.
22
616
Explain how a manager at a company might use social media as a tool
to improve communication within the company. Include any considerations the manager should have in selecting which type of social media
platform to use.
23
642
Social media can be a helpful tool not just for marketers trying to reach a
new audience, but for any company recruiting new employees. Research
how companies use social media when looking for potential employees.
List some implications this has for a person seeking a job in today’s world.
Social Media Activities
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