Hello dear classmates,
Friday I will elaborate about social media and social advertising. Although this is a relatively new form of advertising, it has only been going on for a few years, there are a lot of companies who succeeded and failed ad it.
The first article tries to empirically proof that word of mouth advertising trough social media is an effective marketing way. They use social networks for this research. They found that word of mouth advertising had a long term effect on acquiring new customers.
In the second article the authors try to predict the stock market by looking at the public sentiment. The public sentiment was a very difficult thing to measure but with the arrival of micro blogs like Twitter this became easy. With tools that deduct emotions from tweets they were able to read the public sentiment and fairly predict what the stock price would be in three days.
The third article is about calculating the return on investment of social media. The problem with calculating ROI is that it is based on monetary value. This is difficult to do with social media. There is a clear cash outflow but no clear inflow. Top managers do not like that and it is not favorable accounting wise. The authors mention companies which successfully calculated there ROI. This article also gives managers a simple and clear framework about good social marketing strategy. In a simple manner they explain what your current strategy is, what it should be, and if you are already doing it good, how you can keep it that way. This article also introduces the 4c´s. I think you could call this the `social media marketing mix´ which focuses on connections, creation, consumption and control. It focuses on relationships with consumers and when properly used it will create the most participation from consumers which in the long term creates the most ROI.
The last article tries to encourage managers to allocate their resources to social media by taking away uncertainties. An important term used in this article is social ROI. It means that the return should not be seen as monetary value but as a social value. Social ROI could improve the authenticity, transparency and trustworthiness of a company which in the long term could provide for monetary benefits. This article gives a useful framework which distinguishes social media in four platforms depended on Information Depth and Half-life of information. It is important for managers to know what their marketing objective is so they can choose the right platform.
As examples I will use two cases which make a clear point about how social marketing and advertising can make your image and how it can break your image, in just 24 hours. Almost every company who had negative publicity through social media tried to control the damage. I thought why? Information moves fast through the social media medium, and there always is a new ‘hot’ thing. I you have bad publicity as a company, shouldn’t you just ignore it? I found it that people these days get the news fast, but they also forget fast.
I hope you all have a good night rest,
