The Imperative of Social Media Marketing

Come down from you tower and realize the facts.  Social media is not a top-down channel but customer-driven. But don’t get too cozy either and think you can just survive by monitoring the online talk from your chair. Social media is also interactive and to engage your customers you need to be pro-active, too.


So get involved is still the chant of social media buzz. However, the discussion of social media marketing in general is medium driven in many ways. Everybody recognizes the top 3 biggest social media channels, but wonder which one of them is effective just for their business. Thus companies sort know where to go but what and how are still obscure.

In the heat of social media few years back, companies started blogs many of which now  have died out due to lack of participation from both parties. Oops, online brand awareness was more complicated than expected and building up customer relationship wasn’t that easy of a task after all, wasn’t it? If customers don’t accept the message the company is sending, the result does not fall far from traditional advertizing: no action, no community. The level of participation from a firm cannot be just news feeds but also providing real customer value.

Another cruel example of poor judgment comes from attitudes to crisis management. In the social media, companies need to have a clear strategy for mitigating any disasters—and preferably to prevent them from occurring in the first place. Finns know the urban legend of restaurant Lehtovaara. People talk about your business even though you’re not, and you need to participate in the discussion whether you like it or not. Whether a compliment or  a complaint, to show consumers that you’re listening and reacting can create loyalty.

Jessica Tsai also highlights the importance of relationships in her article Everyone’s Social (Already) (Customer Relationship Management, June 2009). Social media is foremost facilitating relationships and connecting people. These relationships stem from mutual interest and mutual gain, which also are powerful tools for customer loyalty. In mobilizing your customers to become your heralds is the fact that social media marketing is networking.

What does it take to get involved?

In practical level, another problem businesses face with social media is that they don’t have a strategy. But like any business decision, participating in social media requires a plan and a purpose. As Tsai acknowledges in the article, social media strategy requires operational, technological, and customer service resources—all of which extend beyond the marketer’s control. On the other end of the strategy, considerations of how social media will affect the company itself (brand-building, product development, marketing communication and advertising) ought to be analyzed, too.

Interesting prospect presented in the article was the growing role of company representatives. The brand is taking a backseat to the person representing the company. Social media is about people and personalization of content in both sides of the medium. This if anything stresses that social media is not some channel or crowd separated from the business; rather it’s the people representing the brand and the company. 

A common slant over getting involved is also the question of cost efficiency ratio. Whereas enterprises may have the resources to invest on research and social media experiment, small businesses can do only so much. However, as Jeremy Farber states in the article, social media provides a platform that can be just as effective. It requires knowledge of the mediums, the communities as well as best practices of communication in online environment. To me, succeeding in social media marketing is more dependent on the level of expertise in these areas rather than the size of the company and especially the content provided. Also, encouraging point raised in the article was that social networks themselves are struggling to establish revenue models, thus providing an opportune time for businesses to take advantage.

Warming up the conversation

Getting involved also means change in attitude. The confidence customers’ require demand authenticity and transparency from the companies they transact with. Many customers now feel entitled to talk to the brand - a phenomenon that Tsai predicts to only intensify as Millennials take over the market. 

Is there an art to channeling conversation into a meaningful activity for marketers? According to Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner, community members want freedom but they don’t mind ground rules. ‘If you’re all over the place, they don’t know why they’re there.’ stating that crowds need direction. ‘Tell them what you’re looking for and how they can benefit to create a sense of what’, this is what Sarner calls mutual purpose.

So what then? We have the purpose and the community, but do we really know who our customers are? David Dalka, independent marketing consultant, states that ‘social media still a giant blob of data not connected to individuals.’ Self-identity is required to know the customer. Tsai notes, that soon consumers will have a single online identity, such as OpenID. I, too, believe that in the future the ecommerce platforms and social mediums are brought to closer integration and co-operation e.g. in terms of user login and the overall purchasing process. But that future is still far ahead due to user identity development and security issues.

The reality

Let’s reflect how companies are performing social media marketing wise at the moment. Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are taken over by the 100 largest companies in Fortune 500 according to Burson-Marsteller, the first  being the most popular platform. Two-thirds of the Fortune 100 have at least one Twitter account and on average 4.2 Twitter accounts. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are mostly West-oriented; Asia-Pacific companies don’t use them as much, instead preferring corporate blogs. 43% of Facebook fan pages had posts from fans. In fact, some of the pages were primarily set up for customers to post comments and questions to receive responses from the company.

However, a recent survey conducted on British small-to-medium sized companies (SMEs) gives some insight to the overall attitudes and the astray to social media. According to Forum of Private Business, where 52%of SMEs use social media, only 27% of respondents saw popular networking sites beneficial. Surprisingly, 21% described them as ‘not useful' and 6% labeled them ‘useless'. Only 7% respondents who use social media described it as ‘very useful' for their businesses.

Don’t lose your hope yet; it’s not about the size as noted earlier. In fact, young SMEs are spending more of their advertizing money online and have more aggressive social media strategies according to NetNewsCheck. Young SMEs are spending nearly three times as much of their marketing budget online as the older companies and want their money to be spent on iPad apps, reputation management, search engine optimization (SEO) and other new forms of marketing.

When it comes to social media strategy, 43 % of US companies with 500 or fewer employees report that their marketing department handles social networking outreach, followed by public relations (26%) and human resources (19%). Usually employers have 1-3 people communicating on behalf of their organization in social media, whilst 7 % report that 4-5 individuals and 11% more than 6 individuals to manage the communication.  Not surprisingly, 57% stated that they didn’t know.

How about the efficiency? According to Social Influence Benchmark Report by StrongMail , email proved to be the most popular method of sharing content, with 86% of the companies using that as their preferred sharing method. However, the percentage of information to go viral was much higher on non-email channels. Only 41% of email was re-shared whereas in Twitter the content was re-shared 1837% of the time. Also, personal links (i.e. embedded links for blogs) were more viral than Facebook. On the other hand, emails resulted in approximately 16% more clicks (e.g. purchases, sign-ups) than blogs and badges.

From these results it’s obvious that building presence in social media channels requires more than just company/product profile. More strategic and cross-media approach need to be taken to build the relationship and dialogue with consumers. As for the SMEs, the confusion that traditional SMEs are experiencing may be form the fact that they don’t know how to use the platforms; they don’t have Doers to advantage the new marketing channels. 

Conclusions

Whether companies like it or not, social media is impacting business. Not only the marketing functions and product development but attitudes, too. The follow-up and dialogue with consumers not only reinforces customer service but helps the company better understand the life of its product. More importantly, the focus should be in the future. To catch and assure purchase intents is more relevant than emphasizing past transactions.

However, it must be clear that social media cannot be ignored. Not every channel work for every business and thus early adoption is crucial. Getting involved in social media is more than presence and building brand awareness, and more importantly is creating value and being alert. Social media is changing and evolving all the time which highlights the need to participate in this co-creation. The sooner you jump in, the better you get.


Source: Tsai, J. (2009). Everyone’s Social (Already). Customer Relationship Management, June 2009, 34-38.

Consumer Chameleon

Reflecting vaguely Simmons’ Marketing to postmodern consumers: introducing internet chameleon (European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 42 pp. 299-310, 2008). As the headline of the study suggests, Simmons provides an introduction of Internet as changing marketing tool. He approaches the subject from brand consumption's point of view. He sees that Internet is a marketing tool that reconciles the tension between individualism and social brand consumption.

Marketers are challenged by the ever fragmenting markets that are dispersing to smaller and smaller segments. In addition to the worry over coming across masses, is the need to win over that one consumer, too. Postmodernity in consumption can also be seen as fragmentation of experience consisting of a series of interrelated ideas, preferences and representations of selves. Thus the self is essentially decentred. Fragmentation is along side with shallow realm the two positions representing postmodern consumer.  

Postmodern consumer – a puzzle

Simmons notes that much of the media (television, music and film) increasingly resemble each other, presenting collages of fleeting moments that excite senses yet rarely connect to a central theme or focus. He further states that these collages of fleeting moments fit to postmodern consumers’ loss of commitment to any single lifestyle or belief system. This kind of detachment promotes their identity jigsaw consisting of various representations of selves even when approaching same product category.

The second position defining the postmodern consumer is the world they live in: superficial and shallow reality, a world mediated by simulation and hyper-real experiences. Postmodern culture has created a partly disinterested nostalgia but also prestalgia, the longing the moments already in advance. The representation of an imagined past or future in the present, focuses postmodern consumption on the ‘right here, right now’. Consumers’ perception of time of is fragmented as they experience themes, tastes, sounds from the past and the future in the perpetual present until they move to the next exciting experience.

These fleeting moments and the concept of time dimensions come down to attention. Consumers are drowning in information and marketing messages for which attention has become most scarce resource of information economy.  You can’t store attention for future use, you can’t allocate it nor can you measure it properly. But can you predict it? What drives consumer's attention? The answer is obvious: me, myself and I.

Brand consumption

In attention economy, intellectual property, arts and letters, virtual text are the power how attention allocated. Even letters have to compete with video and images. So the question is, how does brand consumption fit in to this kind of attention economy? 

Lanham states that if attention is the center of the economy, so is style as the devices that regulate attention are stylistic devices. Postmodern consumers has become obsessed with appearance, where style is a ready and heady substitute for identity, and presentation is viewed as having much more kudos than essence. Consumption/brands is used as means of appropriate and construct self-images that allow consumers to become more desirable and/or likeable in various social contexts. They can switch images and utilise consumption to liberate them from monotony and conformity.  

According to the postmodern manifesto, the meanings of objects are no longer fixed and linked to their functions, but are free-floating and individually defined. Thus, it’s the relationship that what matters to the consumers, not the actual object. Brand is a relationship that the consumer utilizes and modifies with one’s meanings, the product/service itself is secondary.

‘Never have there been so many neat cars out there, so much new and useful engineering, so many marvelous roads to drive them on….. Yet the felt center of the car business has gravitated to design and the brand recognition that design can create. […] And you don’t buy car anymore – you lease it like a piece of software that wears out its welcome in three years.’ (Lanham 2006) 

Style’s role in consumption also means that brands are more and more mediated through digital graphics. The real world becomes a printout through digital graphics and design, and we more and more live in synthetic reality from TV to games and university lectures (Lanham 2008). Style penetrates all, and thus we ought to ask what is the relation between style and substance within and cross different contexts.

Being individual together

There have been arguments that today’s culture of building highly individualized identities through consumption is alienating. This crisis is not new, though. Lanham notes that Western culture has been confronting a crisis of self-consciousness ever since the Renaissance which has only accelerated after Darwin and digital era. To come terms with self-consciousness is accepting the kind of being we are.  In this different identities and representations of self through consumption. Or letting go of the stigma of seeking individuality and consumption.

But rather than disappearing, the forms of socializing are reforming. Neo-tribes, networks of people gathering homogeneously together for social interaction, especially around consumption and brands are growing in the web. Spinning social bonds occur now on personal self-exhibition in front of other consumers through marks and rituals linked to brands. It seems that people do not want to build up their identities and representations of selves in isolation but with communities.

This need is essentially seeking for attention. Individuality calls for reactions. Lanham discusses Hawthorne Experiment as an example to demonstrate the efficiency behind attention: observation is the key. When you share ‘your thing’ with others, you socialize it. This way the individuality becomes more real, more interesting and worth to aspire. For example, in all sorts of performance programs at work places, more attention makes people work harder. Lanham calls this theatrical self-awareness. 

What else is blogging or participating in social media than attention - theatrical self-awareness? Observation, audience, reaction or whatever you want to name it, is the driving force behind the need to show individuality publicly. Building identity and representations of self can be seen as circle of attention, as consumers use these fleeting moments and manifest them to and with others.

Few words on Internet as Marketing Tool

The overall challenge is how to engage postmodern consumers individually and communally. Simmons states that marketers need to empower postmodern consumers to become marketers of their own self-images. Postmodernity calls for experience-based marketing. Marketing techniques need to allow consumers to construct for themselves different styles, forms and types of the same product, to utilize in their representations of different self-images in different situations. Internet enables this and the social aspect of it as Internet allows direct, real-time, individualized interaction with consumers on one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many basis to assure consumers’ objectives.

In user-controlled online environment, the brand proposition has to be highly compelling in order to initiate interaction. The idea that companies can utilize their brand websites to create consumer communities, is not dead yet even though entropy is taking over the social web, too.  Creating consumer community is far more complicated than providing a virtual platform as Simmons suggests.  Of course ideally, marketers would like to have all the information needed from one place, however nowadays web is so fragmented that a brand needs to be crossmedia and preferrably transmedia. Transmedia is the essentially providing these fleeting moments discussed above over and around a brand for people to build up their own collages.

Personally I don’t like the Internet as tool –thinking because it hinders realizing the goals of online or social media marketing. You can use marketing tools within the Web, but the Internet itself must be comprehended on a broader way than as a tool or technology. Internet is not separate reality; rather people are connected through it every day.

Even though the headline is outdated, Simmons touches many important issues yet to be explored: postmodern consumerism and experience-based marketing as discussed earlier but also collaborative customization. The Internet is really taking this to a new level as the voluntary front-end of RD  is getting bigger and bigger when enthusiasts and professionals combine their interests independently or with corporations.

Sources:

Lanham Richard A. (2006) The Economics of Attention: style and substance in the age of information. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago

Simmons, G. (2008). Marketing to postmodern consumers: introducing internet chameleon. European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 42 (3/4), pp. 299-310.

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