“Sharing” is an important interactive feature that signalled the emergence of Web 2.0. Sharing online is not limited to monetary exchange for goods or services with e-commerce, but growing to encompass a wider form entirely. The internet’s growth from bulletin board system to chat rooms, forums and blogs, signalled that individuals have the natural desire of creating and building online communities (Barefoot and Szabo 2010, p.3). Simple business of buying and selling was not enough. Thus today, social media outgrowth from Web 2.0 has become a formidable development in human history (Banning, 2016) that allows both the sharing of social relationships and communications, along with the practical business of shopping. This overall connection can be described as the sharing economy (Hamari et al, 2016). For example, Alibaba Group held the world’s largest online shopping event by using the concept of loneliness for single people to shop and get more promotion on 11 November. It started in 2009, and this year continues as a “tradition”, and it has broken another new record. The “tradition” not only expand and increase the sales of the Alibaba group but also create another level of e-commerce opportunity for social media (Cheng, 2018).
With the increasing number of using social media marketing, there are some companies are unsure as to how they can use social media for their advantage (Information Resources Management Association, 2018, p.21). The thesis of this research paper is social media is very complicated because of the many differences in people and technology. As much, there is no perfect social media marketing formula. Professionals interested need to pay attention to the framework of the chosen social networking platform that interacts with the consumer.
From Online to Social Media Marketing
The most successful marketing organisations will apply the most effective use of information technology tools in developing their marketing strategy (Brennan and Croft, 2012, p.8). As discussed, social media is the latest tool to impact the marketing practices of firms. Social media is integrated into the theoretical framework along with Marketing Management and the Relationship Marketing perspective (Management, ed, p.5). The transparency between marketer and audience is the key of driven social media marketing. The philosophy of social media marketing is immediacy – exposure to the target audience, interact with the target audience and share the business personality (Gunther, 2006).
According to Decision Easification Marketing theory by George Silverman (2001), there are five stages of the decision-making process – problem recognition, search process, evaluation, purchase decision and post-purchase behaviour. Social media marketing is the start-up of the marketing strategy planning. To understand and identify the targeted audience, social media create the interaction with the customer directly. Decision-making process has been influenced by the accessibility and transparency of information. Therefore, it is important to examine what consumers are prospecting to the obstacle and fiction points, or the hesitation of consumer keep repurchasing (Kotler and Setiawan, 2016). The openness of social media and the ability of the public to engage directly with the information provider and with others interested in the information provided, imperfect communication is ethically necessary and effective. “Packaged, filtered, controlled conversations are not” (Gunther, 2006). Social media marketing is not a new and innovative trend but a pervasive and viral spreading marketing tool. The following section will be explained about the rise of social media marketing.
Decline of Websites
The rising of digital media has either slow down or obstruct the development of traditional media such as ad board, newspaper and radio section. Business Insider, an online business website has reported that print advertising market is rapidly declining since the recession in 2009. The Sun, UK’s most popular newspaper reported that they have a very significant decline in sales due to the competition with the tech giants like Facebook, Snapchat and Google (Hodgson, 2017). Traditionally, marketing was adopted when mass production has become widespread. Companies emphasis more on the needs of customers rather than their own structure. They provide time, place, and possession utility to motivate the customer to see the product value (Durmaz and Efendioglu, 2016, p.35). However, traditional marketing has been evolved to another level that it can be integrating with digital marketing.(Kotler, 2016, p.4). Companies using digital platform to serve the customer as quickly as possible and expect to collect feedback from them (Durmaz and Efendioglu, 2016, p.36). Similarly, the terms of marketing 4.0 have been shaped from product-driven marketing (1.0) to customer-centric marketing (2.0) and ultimately to human-centric marketing (3.0). The distinction of Marketing 4.0 is about creating product, service and company cultures that embrace and reflect human values (Kotler et al, 2016, pg i).
In this transition and adaptation period to the digital economy, there is a significant technological advancement have impacted radically on the marketing practices that are adopted by companies. (Ramaswamy & Namakumari, 2012, cited in Management, 2018,p.4) According to the Internet Advertising Revenue Report conducted by PwC, New Media Group, it stated that digital advertising revenues climb rapidly in 2017. Social media usage also increased 36 per cent to now account for about quarter of all online ad revenue (Swant, 2018). Digital technologies transform marketing from analogue information to database information. The revolution is not only providing a pervasive and integrate technology but also it creates a connection with the new wave of consumers.
Social Media Rapid Rise
It is expected that the rise of social media technology is accelerating and it impacts radically on business now and into the future. Mike Gatti, an executive director for the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, said that retailers who are not engaging customers through social media could be missing the boat (Brennan and Schafer, 2010, p.14). In the early age, social media is the new mantra for marketers to create new opportunities and implementation in their business strategy. Marketers had not realised the power of social media tools engaging with customers because outside media agency delegated social media initiatives. (Brennan and Schafer, 2010, p.13.)
Over the past year, although the presence of social media is ubiquitous among consumers and marketers, it still creates the explosion phenomenon in the digital marketing aspect. The key to expanding the marketing strategies is to apply social connectivity through the online platform (Information Resources Management Association, 2018, p.5). Marketer and retailer have adapted themselves to harness this web technology because it can bridge the relationships which require a balance of relevant information about its company, brand and culture (Brennan and Schafer, 2010, p.17). If the company cannot afford to have a presence on the social media website, the other competitor will create the light point for its product and service to steal the glory of the company.
Social Media Marketing is an umbrella term that can be described as the utilization of social media platforms as marketing tools. According to Weinberg (2009), he refers social media marketing as leveraging the ‘social’ through the ‘media’ to ‘market’ businesses’ constituents. In other words, the concept of social media marketing is about the implementation of social media technologies, channels and software to create, communicate, deliver, and exchange offerings that have value for an organisations’ stakeholders (Soloman and Tuten, 2013, p.13). Also, It has been identified as a marketing approach that subset of your online marketing activities, complementing traditional web-based promotional strategies like email newsletters and online advertising campaigns (Barefoot and Szabo, 2010, p.13).
Kaplan and Haenlein (2009) remind us that early social communities were not only restricted to platforms such as Facebook or MySpace but also virtual worlds with real-time interaction feature such as Second Life. Social media cross the boundaries of mass and personal media, they enable individuals to create multiple connections as to thousands or even millions of others. The complexity of social media is due to the sheer quantity of channels and vehicles, with new ones coming online all the time. In order to examine the variety of social media conveniently, it has been categorised into four zones which are a social community, social publishing, social commerce and social entertainment (Solomon and Tuten, 2013, p.4)
Banking on Facebook Marketing
Undoubtedly, the most common social networking site that first comes to our mind is Facebook. If Facebook is a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world, lagging behind only China and India (Zarrella, 2010, p.1). Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, had launched Facebook in 2004. The main mission of Facebook is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected (Facebook, 2012) The initial idea of creating Facebook is to increase the connectivity with the community and leverage the communication into the digital platform. However, as facebook developed, there is an uncertainty occur whether Facebook was a business or just a social networking site (Musonera and Weber, 2018, p.10).
Facebook is a multifunctional social networking site. It is not only a media that can bridge the relationship of humans but also it offered entertainment and business opportunity. The significant feature such as rating, review, promotional ads, become a powerful marketing tool. Without sacrificing their vision of connecting the world, in 2011, the company launched a form of online platform (Portal) that allows marketers and creative design agencies to build promotions on Facebook. One of the successful marketing features is Facebook Ads (Figure 1). Facebook Ads allows marketers to target on the consumers, groups and business to business interaction by analysing their preferences, algorithm occur on Facebook (Zarrella, 2010, p.245). Compare to other media, Facebook provides “free” marketing that many companies or service, either small or large can afford (Tran, 2012, p.230). Facebook is now a direct competitor of Google in online advertising and this new service has made it possible for companies such as Financial Times and ABC News to create dynamic commercial graphics or advertisement.
To revive a brand that always being overshadowed by other companies, in 2004, Dove has launched their “Campaign for Real Beauty” to empower the positive lights toward the beauty of women. The campaign has been running 15 years and is widely recognised as one of the successful marketing campaigns to strengthen a positive body image for the woman. However, In 2017, Dove had taken the wrong step to present the product by carrying an overtly racist message.
A short advert has been posted on Facebook to present Dove body wash. The content of this ad is about a black woman removes her brown shirt, and she becomes the white woman in the end (Figure 2.0). The transition from a black woman to the white woman provoke a long-running racist trope in soap advertising: a “dirty” black person cleansed into whiteness (Astor, 2017). The dirty of soap advertising is still happen by other big branded company such as Nivea, Intel, Qiaobi.To protect the image of Dove, Unilever which is the company that owned Dove has published an apologised post on its Facebook page and Twitter account (Slawson, 2017). But, the company apology was unimpressed and the image has dropped with the exclusively negative comment. The anger of the audience mentioned that the advertisement is a very obvious racism case which a long run company should be examined or checked before they posted out. It has transformed into a serious stage until the social media users were trying to boycott Dove’s product (Figure 3.0).
The Pitfalls of Social Media Marketing
From Jenkins (2006) concept, he described that social media has developed in this unique convergence, participation and “crowdsourcing” environment. From Kotler (2016) terms, he elaborated that marketing has evolved from customer-centred marketing to human and value centre marketing. He also mentioned that the evolvement of technology shape marketing into the various way such as content marketing, social media marketing. A common method that every marketer like to apply today. However, social media marketing is not as simple as just create an account and waiting for people to interact with you. Social media marketing is as complicated as you understand the universe. The involvement with human and technology create a lot “paradoxes” that require us to further research: the tension between privacy and increased transparency; the relationship between “online” and “offline,” virtual and real lives in a “blurred context” and the ability of audiences to organise information in an age of increasing overload (Albarran, 2013, p.54)
Online life cannot replace offline life. In other words, technology is at the service of humans and should make us more sociable. Technologies could potentially anonymity (Albarran, 2013, p.51) In contrast, Sherry Turkle, a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, has written a book, Alone Together (2017) about how technology is changing the way we communicate. She mentioned that we are addicted to the web until the digital and online environment has slowly dominant our current real life. The illusion that technology will give us control and end up we are being controlled.
Confusion between online and offline
In the real environment, we are getting closely connected through the social media which marketer cannot ignore. Self-representation has been expanded to the digital platform which social media platform, for instance, has become part of the self-representation exploring platform. From the research paper by Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007), they proposed the participation of a user is affected by the relationship they had in the offline world. The purpose of developing themselves into social media is to establish a stable offline and online connections with the person they care more about. By looking into the analytics report by Enli and Thumim (2012), they distinguished the patterns of users in the social media by observing their active status in social networking sites: the reluctant practice, the sharing practice and promotional practice.
The reluctant practice is people restricting the private or intimate information by sharing more informative posting to the online community (Enli, and Thumim, 2012). Second, which is the opposite side of the first one, the sharing practice, people expose more private information, including personal weaknesses and mistake. The information is comparably intimate and emotional which somehow we can understand their personal characteristic or emotion by reading these intimate details (Enli, and Thumim, 2012). Third practice can be described as the promotional practice. This category has been placed between the two other categories, it includes the elements of reluctance and sharing. User updates their status by sharing the more positive information, meaning that the users use social media identity profile as their PR-agents (Enli, and Thumim, 2012).
According to Gasser and Palfrey theories (2008), the type of online user has been distinguished into two different groups which are Digital Immigrants and Digital Natives. The difference between these two groups is the timing when they approach the online world. Digital Immigrant is a late-comer to join in this virtual community, in the opposite, digital natives have been familiar with this online community since they born to the world. However, both of these group have a commonplace that they live much of their lives in the online spaces.
Look into the behaviour of Digital Natives, the scholar has a debate about the direction of Digital Natives’ self-representation has transformed into multiplicity. They tend to discover a different aspect of “self” in experimental ways, both online and offline (Gasser and Palfrey, 2008). From the book by Gasser and Palfrey (2008), most Digital Natives admit they had multiple self-representations in the converged online and offline worlds. The reason for transforming into the multiplicity is the use of various technologies. Furthermore, to support the terms of multiplicity, from the theory of behaviourism by Skinner (1953), he explained that in a part of a group, individuals tend to behave into a different depends on the group of community.
By using the frameworks of the social media, users can decide which information they want to represent themselves as the “online-self”. Online spaces have constructed the process which physical body is perceivably absent, and the representations of the self must be precisely chosen (Gatson, 2011). On the contrary, online spaces have been described as an exploding platform. These types of users tend to explore the mediation of self-representation in social networking because the users can collect the feedback from online and be trying it in real life (Davis, 2012). The distinction of self-representation in social media and physical reality is closely related. Our true self has been slowly reflected the social media and also our online self has been transformed into refraction from social media.
The Authenticity in Social Media
The authenticity of information in social media is always explored and discussed by a lot of scholar expert and researcher. A recent discussion has suggested that the new conditions for authenticity are created by the pervasive and on-going changes brought by globalization and super-diversity, mobility, mediation and increased socio-cultural complexity (Leppänen. et al, 2015). In the past media industry, the legacy media like newspaper, magazines, and television are the business model of communicating from one to many with limited ways in which the public could contribute to the information-making process. However, Internet construction extends the business model of social media from one-to-many or one-to-several or one-to-one, depending on user intent. (Albarran, 2013, p.118)
By focusing on informal and interest-driven social media practices, it shows in detailed ways how participants in and around social media mobilize particular sets of linguistic and other semiotic resources. The authentication can be made and unmade: how it is achieved, crafted, argued for, negotiated, questioned, debated or rejected by participants. Misinformation on social media has become a widespread concern that damage societies (Flynn et al. 2017). That includes a vast data breach, government inquiries across the globe, new advertisement fraud allegations, and the continuing stream of viral fake content and hate speech (Levin, 2018).
In response, Facebook and other social media companies have made a range of algorithmic and policy changes to limit the spread of false content. However, misinformation on social media genuinely spread faster than the correct one (Meserole, 2018). The high availability and overly sharing such news on social media has driven the new model of misinformation propagation. Due to the self-interest of the user over sharing a particular story, information and misinformation without fact-checking techniques are blended together that mislead the users’ belief. For example, Facebook is a platform that provides convenience for the user to access and share the information easier. Based on their preferences and the algorithms that identify their interest, users get selective posts in their news feed. Compare to the traditional model of news dissemination, the source of the information will commonly judge, examine and investigate before publishing to the public. However, in the digital age, the intelligence of the algorithm is getting more customised and more relevant to the taste of the user which it somehow will lead to the emergence of misinformation propagations (Pourghomi. et al, 2017 ).
Responding to Consumer Behavior on Social Media
Significantly, there is a number of existing researches shed lights on the importance of social media dedicated to marketing aspects. At the same time, consumer online behaviours are evolving at a fast rate which their role is shifting from being passive recipients of pieces of information to becoming active generators of information. (Stewart and Pavlou, 2002). Consumer behaviour can be predicted from observing and analysing from the user-generated content such as in the social networking site. Based on the consumer activities patterns in social media, there are some academic studies has categorised it into different segmentation. Heinonen (2011) proposed that consumer perform a variety of activities can be conceptualized based on two dimensions: consumer motivations and consumer input. The concept was modified from Shao (2009) journal. Shao (2009) reveals that consumers’ activities can be distributed into three main types: consumption, participation and contribution. It provides general information about what kind of input consumer will be performed on social media. Social media marketing is not about understanding the underlying technology, but rather about understanding people, how they’re using that technology, and how you can leverage that to engage with them more effectively.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Since the advent of Facebook, Twitter and numerous platforms, online conversations has been increasing for those brands and companies who always been concerned by their visibility and reputation. It should be acknowledged that companies and brands should pay attention to build a trustworthy relationship with online consumers because of the risk and challenges that have been involved in social media.
According to Paul Greenberg (2009) theory, customer relationship management is defined as
“a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment.”
It is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation”. The implementation of a customer relationship management strategy requires companies or brands to measure and value the relationship of the customer. There is a difference between customer relationship management and social media marketing, although their relationship is relevant to each other, their purpose is different. Customer relationship management is to resolve customer issues and social media marketing is involving in reviving the brand message and content through social media (Kotler, 2016, p.1b). Social media marketing act like an input that improves and expand the image of the brands or companies and customer relationship management is a backward integration to collect the information and feedback from consumers.
Customer relationship management in social media is unlike traditional CRM. Since 2003, the response and feedback from consumer have affected the impact of the social communications – which changes how business must respond to that customer Additionally, what marketing departments are trying to promote, the consumer today is not easy to get persuade (Greenberg, 2009, p.1). Typically, to involve into the ongoing dialogues with the consumer, the first is listening to the voice of the customer. The second is to bring out the brand topic in general conversations to obtain more favourable outcomes. The third method is to handle the negative complaints that potentially lead to brand crises. Like the case study has been mentioned in the paper, when dove posted the ad that involved sensitive issue, online user feel offensive and anger at the content of the advertisement. What dove has done is they stand out to make an official apology in the twitter account (Figure 3).
Online Reputation Management (ORM)
Clearly, a lot of studies have emphasised that social media has offered everyone the opportunity to talk about products, brands and consumption experiences. A recent survey stated that 22% of people who have had a bad experience are likely to comment about it online while only 9% of people who have had a good experience will do the same (O’Neil, 2012). Thus, It should be noted that a company’s reputation has become significantly affected by people’s ability due to the Internet. Online reputation management involves building a positive perception of a company’s brands which is based on the entities previous behaviour, what was posted by the entity, and what third parties share about the entity on the Internet (Portmann et al, 2015, p.90). Initially, it was considered as a three-part process – monitoring, participating and measuring (Jones, Temperley & Lima, 2009).
According to Scott (2009) statement, he stated that “the power of the Internet makes it easier for people to fall in love with you faster. But beware—it also makes it easier for them to fall out of love with you faster. It’s a double-edged sword” (p. 11). Companies may adopt a passive approach by simply ignores what people will say about it online. However, this approach is not recommended. Beal (2008) suggests that companies should monitor their name, brands, company’s executives, slogans, competitions instead of monitoring their reputation. Monitoring online information can be tricky somehow. The notion of online reputation can be distinguished into reputation in real life and e-reputation. According to Castellano and Dutot (2013), e-reputation is considered to be a con-construction process involving both companies and consumers.
Generally, marketers can apply online tracking tools to measure online reputation. There is a lot of open source analytics tool available for companies or organisations. Such as social media analytics is a tool that can track online reputation. Social media analytics is defined as “the practice of gathering data from social media websites and analysing the data using social media analytics tools to make a business decision.” (Rouse, 2017).
The tools provide detailed dashboards that can aggregate real-time information which is useful in a wide aspect of disciplines in social science such as political science, sociology, geology, business and marketing and journalism (Segerberg and Bennett, 2011).
Conclusion
Relatively, social media marketing is a general structure in digital marketing framework. Based on The Word of Mouth Marketing Association note, a professional organization for the social media industry, encourages members to “create an environment of truth between consumers and marketers.” (Albarran, 2013, p.125) It is clear that social media allow business and marketing to expand various opportunities by exchange in both private and public conversation. Companies who did not pay attention to a framework of social media marketing will need to pay a high cost. Besides, marketers are also will struggle to discover methods for understanding their targeted audience when a huge number of Internet users are rushing to social networking sites. Marketing shopping decision, promotions through social media has affected consumers’ need and desire. According to Curran et al. (2011), social media such as Facebook are better than other marketing platforms because marketer can target their audience easily by observing the store information on all its users.
This study has attempted to identify the major complication and glamorous of Internet technology in the area of social media marketing. The medium has much consideration that needs to concern before you start marketing with social media. Thus, the researcher has provided the broadway of how the marketer can create and capture the value of social media and apply to the marketing framework. The average business owners or marketers do not fully understand the risks and challenges. The method of evaluating your company and the qualifications of social media should take it as marketing planning. So before a company step into the field of social media marketing, they have to complete full research on social media practices. An organization has to master basic principles and tactics of using social media as an effective tool in order to survive in the field of social media marketing. Main goals of a company or organization have to engage customers, to protect company reputation, to provide customers with good quality of product and services and to satisfy the customers need.
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