An Introduction to Social Media Marketing

Alan Charlesworth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135006143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Social media has given marketers a way to connect with consumers in an unprecedented and revolutionary way, but the very newness of this medium is as challenging as it is exciting, particularly to those who aren't 'digital natives'. This is the first textbook for students that offers a step by step guide to this newly dominant marketing discipline.

Mirroring its sister text Digital Marketing: a Practical Approach, this book is grounded in solid academic underpinnings, but has a lighter, hands-on approach that is perfect for shorter courses and additional reading.

Chapter exercises not only help develop knowledge, but test the learners' understanding of how the various concepts and models are best used by requiring them to investigate how they are best applied in real-world scenarios.

The book is supported by the author's excellent website, which includes links to continually updated statistics as well as articles that keep the reader in touch with the constant changes to this dynamic area.

Topics covered in this book include:

• Social networking

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• Consumer reviews

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• Social service and support

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• Real-time social media marketing

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• Blogging

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• Viral marketing and influencers

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• Advertising on social media

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And much more.

An Introduction to Social Media Marketing is the first of its kind and ideal reading for students who want to work in a digital marketing environment, as well as the traditional marketer who wants to get to grips with this vibrant, and potentially lucrative facet of present-day marketing.

1 Introduction Social media: the what, why and how

DOI: 10.4324/9780203727836-1

It’s not about the brand, it’s about the customer.

This is a book about marketing that will help marketers – be they students or practitioners – to learn about the newest facet of the subject: the use of digital social media as part of a strategic marketing initiative. However, before we can even make a start on studying social media marketing it is necessary to have an understanding of what social media is and why – and how – people and organizations use it.

Social media defined

“what is understood by the term social media is still open to some debate”

Such is the speed of developments within it, many aspects of the digital world are still to be assigned a satisfactory definition – and what is understood by the term social medi a is still open to some debate. I have previously defined social media as ‘a collective term for the various social network and community sites including such online applications as blogs, podcasts, reviews and wikis’ (Charlesworth 2009), although a more tangible description might be ‘any web presence where users can add their own content but do not have control over the site in the same way as they would their own website’. These definitions reveal a conviction on my part – and that of others – that social media existed long before the digital revolution made it the cultural phenomenon it is now recognized as being.

Lessons from history

In the influential Writing on the Wall (2013) Tom Standage argues that social media can be traced back to Roman times – hence the book’s subtitle, Social Media, the First 2000 Years. At that time members of the elite in society would exchange letters – with those letters then being copied and shared via speeches and books with fellow members of their social circles. Whilst the technology has changed since those times, the craving to connect with friends and share information is much the same. This leads Standage to assert that many of the questions prompted by digital social media have arisen before and so history provides some valuable lessons to the twenty-first-century marketer.

Before Internet technology made it possible, however, social contact between communities of like-minded people who shared views on everything from politics to the best way to grow tomatoes was restricted by the logistics of geography and limitation in communication media. And if you wanted to praise or denounce a product, brand or organization you could do so only to your close circle of friends and associates. Such restrictions do not apply to the digital generation, however. Be it on a PC, laptop or hand-held device, user generated content can be spread around the world at the touch of a keyboard or mouse. Other definitions, such as that from Marketo (2010), describe social media as ‘the production, consumption and exchange of information through online social interactions and platforms’. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) associate social media with digital technology when they describe social media as ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content’. This association of social media with the Internet relies on the reader comprehending another misunderstood – and over-used – term from the digital lexicon: Web 2.0. As the first decade of the new century drew to a close, observers such as Tapscott and Williams (2006) drew popular attention to the link between Web 2.0 and the new social media by suggesting that the old web was about websites, clicks and ‘eyeballs’, but the new web – Web 2.0 – was about communities and participation. In their paper, ‘Web 2.0: Conceptual Foundations and Marketing Issues’, Constantinides and Fountain (2008) used the following definition which, seemingly, also describes social media using the term_

Web 2.0 is a collection of open-source, interactive and user-controlled online applications expanding the experiences, knowledge and market power of the users as participants in business and social processes. Web 2.0 applications support the creation of informal users’ networks facilitating the flow of ideas and knowledge by allowing the efficient generation, dissemination, sharing and editing/refining of informational content.

Although this has a rather academic feel to it, their subsequent paragraph cuts to the chase with regard to the impact of social media on marketers:

Figure 1.1 Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 presents businesses with new challenges but also new opportunities for getting and staying in touch with their markets, learning about the needs and opinions of their customers as well as interacting with them in a direct and personalised way.

Based on David Bowen’s original concept (entitled Web 2007), Figure 1.1 might help readers with the notion of Web 2.0 as well as demonstrating its link with social media. The matrix attempts to describe how Web 2.0 translates into online activity. Note the cross-over to social media in that the four quadrants, effectively, show how web content moves from that controlled by the organization to that over which it has no control.

The ideological facet of social media is taken up by McConnell and Huba (2007) who are more philosophical in their definition, suggesting that it is ‘the sum total of people who create content online, as well as the people who interact with it or one another’. Bryan Eisenberg (2008) – perhaps reflecting on his background as practitioner in, and writer on, online marketing – claims the various elements that make up social media do not actually represent media but a ‘platform for interaction and networking’. His argument is that traditional media provide platforms for delivery of ads near and around relevant content (though it is common for those with a technical background to refer to social networking sites as ‘collaboration platforms’, the description being more of the physical entity than the concept recognized by marketers). Eisenberg’s point raises the issue of whether we are trying to define the publisher of the communication or the content of that communication?

Twitter co-founder Evan Williams adds to the confusion by offering a term describing Twitter without using the word ‘social’. In an interview with Inc. magazine’s Issie Lapowsky, Williams said:

“Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network”

They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn’t replace anything … but the insight we eventually came to was Twitter was really more of an information network than it is a social network.

Commenting on the phenomenon of social media, online marketing educator Aaron Kahlow (2009) takes the ‘publisher’ issue a stage further, suggesting that marketing, journalism, advertising and media intersect in what he calls ‘user controlled media (UCM) – [that is] the media users control, leverage, rate and review, forward, tag, and ultimately decide if it’s worth our time, our friends’ time, and everyone’s time’. Perhaps a little cynical, but it is in many ways an accurate description. Another practitioner, this time authority on search engine optimization, Danny Sullivan, provides not a dictionary definition but a list of variants of social media that go a long way to describe the concept. His five types of website that comprise social media are:

• Social News Sites (e.g., Digg, Reddit).
• Social Bookmarking Sites (e.g., Delicious, StumbleUpon).
• Social Networking (e.g., Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn).
• Social Knowledge (e.g., Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers).
• Social Sharing (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr).

Whilst this list is excellent in helping the e-marketer visualize the concept in practical terms, it ignores the fact that some aspects of social media can be part of sites that have primary objectives other than providing an outlet for members of society to communicate with others. This includes sites that encourage consumer generated content (CGC), rather than sites that are themselves part of consumer generated media – perhaps a more realistic description of websites that are socially inclined. Such content would include user comments in a product review on a retail website – a type of website not included in Sullivan’s list. Being descriptive without categorizing, the e-tailing group’s (2009) list of ‘social media tools’ includes Facebook, Twitter, viral videos, customer reviews, customer Q&A, blogs, community forums, social listening tools and product suggestion boxes. Whilst this list helps identify aspects of social media, it is a somewhat confusing list of generic elements and branded websites – and viral videos seem a strange choice, why not call them ‘consumer generated videos’? It is this wide-ranging list of potential elements of social media that prompts me to disagree with the notion that social media marketing can be renamed as online public relations. Whilst this has some merit, in that reacting to poor comments or reviews might be considered part of the public relations (PR) function, other aspects must be part of a strategic communications strategy and so beyond the remit of the PR department. Perhaps it is that in some companies (and consultancies) the skills necessary to participate in social media can be found in PR and so that discipline is trying to claim social media marketing as its own?

Dark social

A report published by McKinsey & Company (Aufreiter et al 2014) brought a sharp reminder to organizations that social media might be sexy and topical, but it is not always the only – or the best – method of communicating with customers. Figure 1.2 shows the use of smartphones and tablets for email and accessing Facebook. Depending on one’s digital marketing objectives, email could be a better platform than social media – in particular, email is nearly 40 times better than Facebook and Twitter at acquiring customers.

Indeed, some commentators suggest that...