Engaging Customers and Prosumers – Home Assignment

25

September

2015

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This week we discussed and read about the different ways to engage with consumers and prosumers. With the progress of Social Media and the Web 2.0 it is becoming easier for companies to have a quick and direct contact with their loyal and potential customers. Experts heavily argue that it is crucial for companies to use Social Media for their marketing strategies in order to be successful (Giamanco & Gregoire, 2012). Why? Simply because that’s where all the customers are. They use it to ask questions about certain products or even to manifest whether they are satisfied or unsatisfied with what the company offers. However, the use of such a platform is a very slippery slope. A simple mistake may lead to disastrous and unrecoverable consequences which will tarnish the company’s image and reputation. As the use of Social Media is unavoidable nowadays, it is imperative for companies to be aware of what makes a post successful or not.

Giamanco and Gregory (2012) explain that is not the company’s role to initiate the conversations anymore, they should rather monitor what is being said on Social Media, and tap in relevant conversations.

Li and Soonius (2012) meticulously scrutinized various Facebook Campaigns which led to an understanding of the different factors which could influence a campaign’s total reach (e.g. time of the day, day of the week, multimedia and quality over quantity).

Li et al. (2014) also discussed what influences a company’s Corporate Reputation on Twitter. This means whether a company meets social expectations regarding the quality of their products and services, industry leadership and impact on society. Their findings highlighted two factors that positively influence a Corporate Reputation; User Informedness and User Engagement.

Even with such guidelines it is possible to make mistakes which might tarnish a company’s image for the years to come. One of the factors that we mentioned was to try and include humor in a Facebook Campaign as it might increases the total reach. However, some jokes can take it one step too far for some. For example, London Luton Airport’s post on Facebook caused quite a stir. Using a picture of a plane which slid off the runway because of ice and killed a 6-year old on board to say that their airport is “super” as they “prevent” such disasters.

There are also quite a few examples of Social Media done right. Taking the example of Evernote (https://www.facebook.com/evernote?fref=ts), their Facebook page takes into account most of the factors we spoke about from the articles. Their posts are most of the time concise and composed of only a few catchy sentences. Also, a text is always accompanied by an image, link or video which makes it more interesting to look at. Additionally, on every one of their post customers ask questions about why certain features don’t work and Evernote always answers in a rapid and useful manner, often solving the problem in one go.

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26

October

2012

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For this weeks homework assignment I had to read three articles. The articles focus on the topic ‘Diffusion and Social Influence’. I will give a brief summary of the articles and then discuss the main findings. After that, I will compare two examples of social networks related to the topic by identifying their strengths and weaknesses.

The first article is examining how firms can create word-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion by designing viral features into their products and marketing campaigns. The main findings of this article were that designing products with passive-broadcast viral messaging capabilities generate more total peer influence and social contagion than adding active-personalized viral messaging capabilities.

The second article examines how opinion leadership and social contagion within social networks affect the adoption of a new product. The main findings here were that contagion is operating over network ties and adoption is affected by peers’ usage volume, rather than by whether peers have adopted or are prescribing. There’s already an effect if people see the message.

In the last article of this week, microblogging is examined. It’s a form of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) for sharing consumer opinions concerning brands. The broad reach of eWOM provides consumers a large clout to infouence brand image and perceptions. The writers concluded microblogging can be viewed as a competitive intelligence source. The more people talk about something, the hotter the subject will be.

The examples I have chosen are Twitter and Facebook. As everyone in class should know these two networks, an other summary of the companies would be overrated. So I go on with the comparison between the two platforms.

The strengths of both Twitter and Facebook are:

  • Pushing information to followers
    With only a few words you can reach a lot of people
  • Easy to follow/like

The weaknesses of both Twitter and Facebook are:

  • You only receive information if you follow or like the company
    Searching for the information is more difficult with Facebook than it is with Twitter

There are also a few differences between the strengths and weaknesses of Twitter and Facebook.

Strength of Twitter

  • Easy to find an opinion using #

Weakness of Twitter

  • Short messages
    Because of the short message, there is less information in a Tweet. This could have a negative effect on peoples behavior because they are not fully updated.

Strength of Facebook

  • More detailed information
    More space to tell the story, including pictures, videos, links and many words. There’s enough space to write down what you want to say.

Weakness of Facebook

  • Antisocial tendencies
    Different studies showed the use of Facebook has a negative effect. Often it’s mentioned as the source of relationship problems. Though, there are studies which suggest exactly the opposite.

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What about Social Commerce…?

11

September

2012

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Dear classmates!

This first post of me is related to “Social Commerce”.  At first I did not really know what was meant by this concept, therefore I will share the definition which is being presented by IBM: “a subset of electronic commerce that uses social media, online media that supports social interaction and user contributions, to enhance the online purchase experience”. In short it is the combination of social media with e-commerce.

So now that we know what the subject is about lets us look at two examples that can be defined as social commerce. The first one is Amazon.com. You are probably familiar with amazon.com although you will probably use the “Dutch version” more often i.e.. Bol.com.

Amazon started with just selling online stuff on the internet. Today amazon incorporate a lot of other activities. The social aspect of amazon is that you can read what other customers have to say about a particular product. They also help you to get ideas by using the tool: “what other customers viewed”. Nevertheless people often first go to a store before they purchase the product online. Speculators therefore say that amazon should buy, “Best Buy” a large retail company in the US.

The other big idea that is out there is that in the future we will probably relay far more on online mechanism, i.e., omnichanneling (as being presented in the Harvard Business Review). This idea threats traditional retailer, because the consumer will have direct knowledge about information such as , lowest price etc. Personally I do not feel that traditional retailers would vanish from this earth, they just be more adjusted to work together with the online mechanism.

The other example that I will speak about is Pinterest. Personally I was not familiar with this website. I did however heard of it, but it did not capture my attention. Because of this “research” I made a Pinterest account and spend some time looking around. Still I do not see why approximately 7 million people are attracted to this website…

Maybe I am missing something, because I found several examples of companies that went from an unknown company to a big online company by the use of Pinterest. The principle here was simple. Their products where just pinned by someone who liked it. By pinning something you share and if someone else spots it they can re-pin it. With this a lot of people can see the product and demand it if they like it.

In some scenarios (Rodworks.com) the store did not had any online store yet. By receiving a lot of emails of people who wanted to buy their products they opened one that became very successful.

This is an example of the power of social media in general, the downside of this story is that Pinterest fails to make the profits of “selling” this products compared to Twitter or Facebook.

This are my findings, tomorrow we will here more about social commerce!

See you then!

Marjolein

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