Social Media Marketing

The Communication Age is upon us. It has been brought about by the Internet that wired anyone who has a screen to look at: the TV screen, the computer screen, the cellphone screen, and the tablet screen. The Internet has allowed people to communicate with each other and build relationships with each other with ease. And the establishment of social networking sites made it much more interesting to socialize in cyberspace. These social networking sites are the following:

1. Twitter – For keeping tab of events and topics or for keeping tab of what are others around them are thinking or doing or feeling. It is also used for reposting of short messages and advertisements.

2. Facebook – For keeping in touch with friends and relatives and other acquaintances. It can also be used to interact with others and to voice one’s opinion. It is also being used for brand promotions and group discounts.

3. YouTube – For video sharing or for posting of comments after viewing a video. It can be used for self-promotion or for promoting certain ideas, products or services.

4. Blog – For sharing opinions and/or information written by individuals or groups on a regular basis.

The Birth of Social Media Marketing

When companies or products joined these sites, people began to interact with the product or companies in personal ways. These social networking sites allowed individual readers to “re tweet” or “repost” comments made by the product being promoted. Thus, social media marketing began and it refers to the process of gaining website traffic or attention through social media sites.1
As a marketing process, social media marketing still has to go through the following initial steps:

1. Understanding of the general trends that can create opportunities or threats to the company or the product.

2. Deciding what segment of the market you would like to target for the company or the product
a. Know your customers by observing and listening carefully.
b. Know where they are

Then, marketers need to learn how to deliver message meaningfully by doing the following:

1. Creating content that attracts attention and encourages target readers or users to share it with their social networks
a. It must be relevant to the target market
b. It must engage the reader or the user
c. It must also entertain

2. Posting the message in a site and creating links that would connect your message to as many target visitors you could get

3. Monitoring as readers share the message with their social network, spreading the message from reader to reader or from user to user which lends the message credibility because it appears to come from an independent third party rather than from a company or a brand with self-interest.

4. Interacting with site visitors and readers and collaborating in making changes to meet the needs of the customers.

Digital Two-Way Marketing

Jack Madrid, the new Country Manager of Multiply Philippines (he used to be the Country Manager of Yahoo Philippines), called the social media marketing as a digital two-way marketing. He said that as a result of development of the social media marketing the 4Ps of marketing had now been changed into the 6 Cs

1. Content

It is story telling. It is saying or demonstrating what the brand stands for. It is demonstrating how the brand could make the life of the customer better or more successful. For example, John Deere leveraged The Furrow Magazine, not to sell John Deere equipment, but to educate farmers on new technology and how they could be more successful business owners using John Deere equipment. A cake mix company could leverage on a recipe, not to sell its product, but to help someone bake something that could win the heart of family members. It is providing services that enhance the use of the product.

As Janette Toral, a blogger and author of several books on Internet commerce who also spoke to our marketing class last year, said, “The content should not only be about your product. It should instead be more about the customers and what he or she values. It is about making a connection between the attributes of your product to the customer value.”

Janette Toral also suggested that content could be created by conducting a video contest that would focus on a theme related to what your targeted customer values. As an example she narrated how a small hotel in Jupiter Street promoted itself by holding a video contest with the following theme: I love Jupiter Street. It so happened that the hotel is located in Jupiter Street and when the contestant started filming, one of the features why Jupiter Street is lovable, the hotel was one of them. When it was posted in the Internet, it created a lot of curiosity and brought a lot of customers to Jupiter Street and the hotel itself.

2. Community

A collective perception about the brand value creates a community. And this shared value could pull people together and by creating groups, through the Internet, people can gather virtually in an online community and interact regardless of physical location.

3. Context

Know your target site visitor. How do your content, site architecture, and links influence your site visitor and search engines? Adjust your content, change the architecture of your site, and create new links as necessary to make it relevant to your targeted site visitors

4. Customization

Providing the technology that could accommodate the differences between individuals and allowing customers to personalize or make changes to your product or service to fit their needs

5. Conversation

After telling your story, each screen interface should be an opportunity for dialogue, interaction, response, and collaboration. The customers become participants creating a whole new level of engagement with the brand.

6. Commerce

Go online to promote and sell your product. It also includes the entire online process of developing, marketing, selling, delivering, servicing and paying for products and services.

Janette Toral suggested the use of discount or group buying websites to promote and sell your products.

My daughter and her partner, who bakes Popcakes, conducted a contest on Facebook where they gave freebies to anyone who would tag a number of their friends with the advertisement of their product. This campaign created website traffic for them that led into sales.

Flipping the Marketing Funnel

In Jack Madrid’s talk to my class in marketing last year he said that the social media marketing has flipped the marketing funnel because now the customer has control over the message through the social media. Where before ones effort has to first create awareness in the product or service that is expected to be followed by interest, desire, and finally by action, today, instead of spending efforts on advertising to create awareness for the product or service, effort is spent first on making sure that the customer is served well so that the customer will talk about the product in a positive way thereby creating more awareness for the said product and service.

By an example, Jack Madrid narrated the following story. There was a person, while waiting at the airport, who twitted that it would be nice to have a steak from a certain outlet which he used to frequent because he liked the product. Obviously, the restaurant serving the steak was on twitter and read the posting. By the time this person landed in another city, there was a delivery van from the restaurant branch in that city of this particular outlet waiting for him to give him the steak that he said he wanted. He was so pleased with the service that he posted it on the social network and it became an instant hit that people just kept repeating the story that eventually created greater awareness for the product and the restaurant.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

The social network has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with Internet access. It has therefore done the following:

1. Fosters brand awareness to anyone with Internet connection

2. Improves the customer service of those companies who are monitoring the Internet traffic.

3. Serves as a relatively inexpensive platform to implement marketing campaigns of anyone who would like to use it.

When Jack Madrid, the Country Manager of Multiply in the Philippines spoke to my class, he said that before the social media, only large companies can spend large amounts of money to advertise their products and services. These ads repeated over time were able to create awareness of the product, develop interest in it, and create a desire for the product and the motivation to take action by buying the product.

Today, all people with practically nothing can create awareness for their products or service through the Internet and could sell their products and services using the different social media. According to Jack Madrid, the Internet is like a bulletin board where anyone can post their products or services and reach a small number of people who may have the same interest on the product or service and where these people could also post their comments on the products or service in terms of how it met their needs or how it could meet their needs better. It allows the producer of the product or the service to make an offer and also allows interested buyer to indicate what they like thereby resulting into changes that make the offer much better because it meets the needs of the buyers.

Jack Madrid also said that the social media had created a tremendous impact in marketing. He called the impact long-tail phenomenon. He explained it as enabling a product or service with low demand and low sales volume to reach many small buyers through the Internet that collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current blockbusters or big ticket items. He gave as an example Amazon.com whose sales is composed of a significant portion coming from obscure books that is not available in brick-and-mortar stores.

Jack Madrid talked about the different screens that influence our lives: first was the movie screen, then it was followed by the TV screen, the laptop screen, the tablet screen, and now the ubiquitous cellphone screen. He said that cellphones have social networking capabilities that are used by products and companies to constantly bombard people with ads at any time of the day and wherever they may be.

What’s the Future?

I met Jonathan E. Eubanks, CEO of Invicta Alliance Partners, who visited the Philippines and made a presentation about social media as a marketing platform. He said that he is creating a new site that will look like a realistic city that could be populated by avatars and real companies that could rent or occupy virtual office buildings or stores where avatars could enter or where visitors to the site could browse or look and order the products of these real companies either for their avatars or for themselves. Deliveries of products ordered by real people could be done by the outlet of the company nearest to the buyer’s location. Payments could also be done virtually or upon delivery. For example, Levi’s could have a virtual store that will carry all their models and all the reader will do is to click on the model he or she wants and fit it to his or her avatar which presumably would have the same measurements of the one who created the avatar. If the buyer is satisfied with the looks of the merchandise then he could easily order it for his or her avatar or even for himself or herself.

The virtual streets would be populated by buildings and store fronts that could also display signs or ads just like in real life. And avatars would be seen walking, shopping, or sitting in a café.

The site could also host casinos that avatars could enter order chips and join any kind of games offered by the casinos.

Is Social Media Here to Stay?

I think social media will still grow in importance in the coming few years as programmers discover new ways of creating more attractive networking methods that people find beneficial and businessmen find profitable. It therefore behooves businessmen, that in addition to their brick and mortar business, to learn how to use the social media for offering their products and services.
The Internet has created so much content, most of them created by the user themselves that users have now so much to choose from thereby creating more fragmentation of the market. It is therefore more important today to create communities of interest around a brand to retain a core audience in order to keep them engaged and loyal.

The social media has allowed amateurs to compete with expensive professional advertising companies at practically no cost at all. And print media currently hosting ads of companies today will see more ads migrating to cyberspace which may not pay the same earnings that they do have now. And since users and readers can respond to anything posted on the Internet, businessmen will be forced to engage with their customers, listen to them and become more personal in their communication strategies.

News, good or bad, travel faster on twitter, written by people as they see events happening before their eyes and received by people on their cellphone or iPad screens at the same time that the event is happening at a no or very low cost to them. If it could be secured this is one good way organizations can share information and knowledge across functional or geographical boundaries.

Relationships would no longer be exclusively dependent on physical presence. The ease with which people could communicate with each other will help in maintaining relationship between people who may at times be temporarily separated due to travel or new assignments. There would also be relationship entirely dependent on virtual presence in cyberspace when we befriend other people of similar interest in the Internet.

Is there anything else I missed? There are probably a lot of things that will emerge from innovation in the social media that we are not yet aware of. It is difficult to anticipate everything that can come out as more technology develops and enhances the Internet. All we can do is try to recognize new developments and be more curious on the potential direction it is taking us. We need to be aware that our minds could bend the information we are receiving because it does not fit our own experience and current knowledge thereby leading us to a wrong conclusion. And most of all we need to understand that our expectations could make us jump into conclusion when what it most needed is the suspension of judgment so that we could be open to different alternative future.
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1 Wikipedia