Social Media Marketing

Alan Charlesworth

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781631577659
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Published in 1837, Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes tells the tale of two weavers who present a non-existent suit of clothes to the Emperor with the caution that the suit is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. As the Emperor parades in his underwear no one dares to say that they see no clothes—with the exception for one small child who exclaims; "he isn't wearing anything at all." Fast forward to the present day and business owners and managers around the world are told that anyone who cannot see the benefits of social media marketing are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. As organizations, brands and products fill the social media landscape with meaningless, objectiveless drivel that has interest to no one and serves only to waste resources and alienate customers, a small voice can be heard exclaiming; "who told you that was a good idea?" The caveat to this contemporary tale is that for a very few organizations, brands and products, social media has provided a kind-of marketing panacea. Correction: make that a very, very few organizations. For the rest, they are metaphorically parading in their digital underwear. All is not lost however. Although many have been duped in a new clothes-esque sting, and that their social media marketing efforts are indeed, invisible—but marketing on social media might just be riding to the rescue.

CHAPTER 1

What Is Social Media

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind

1.1 Introduction

The generation that has grown up with the Internet has also grown up with the assumption that social media is a creation of their generation. But they are wrong. Tom Standage, in his influential 2013 book Writing on the Wall, tells us that social media can be traced back over 2,000 years. In Roman times members of the elite in society would not only exchange letters with individuals, but encourage that the content of those letters be copied and shared with fellow members of their social circles. Such sharing was normally via speeches and books—but these messages were also posted on the walls of buildings in public areas. Note how the term for placing a message on a publicly viewable space is called posting. As in: we post messages. As in: posting a message on social media. Mr Zuckerberg et al didn’t invent a new term for the act when they developed Facebook; they used a good old English term (actually, its etymology is Latin, but you get my drift). I mention this because, whilst the technology has changed since those times, the need to connect with friends and members of the community to share information remains as we progress through the 21^st century. Standage goes on to assert that many of the issues—both positive and negative—raised by digital social media have arisen before and so history might provide some valuable lessons to the contemporary digital marketer.

Long before Internet technology made it possible, social contact existed between communities of like-minded people who shared views on anything from sports teams through politics to the best way to prune roses. Importantly, however, such communication was restricted by the logistics of geography and the limitations of communication tools available to those generations. Effectively, your social contact existed only between a close circle of friends and associates. For the marketer, this limited the number of people to whom you could express delight or criticism of a product, brand, or organization. Such restrictions do not exist for the digital generation. Be it on a PC, laptop, or handheld device, user-generated content can be diffused around the globe at the click of a mouse or—as is now most common—the touch of a screen.

1.2 So What Is Digital Social Media?

Such is the nature of the subject that it is possible—even likely—that any definition offered on these pages might be out-of-date before they are published. This is, perhaps, an exaggeration, but when a previous book of mine (An Introduction to Social Media Marketing) was published in 2015 the content included no mention of Periscope because it simply did not exist when the book was written. Not only that, in little over a year, Periscope was launched, bought by Twitter and relaunched. Furthermore, in December 2016 Twitter announced the launch of Twitter Live, which—as it’s essentially the same—may turn out to be a replacement for Periscope. Vine, on the other hand, was included in An Introduction to Social Media Marketing, but it pretty much ceased to exist in 2016 (at the time of writing, owners Twitter had announced its relegation to being a limited-application camera app).

Although any definition might be fleeting, a book on social media marketing must at least make some attempt to offer a definition of what social media is. In another book from way back in the first decade of the century (time moves very fast in digital circles), I 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). At the time I deliberated over replacing collective with umbrella. In retrospect, I think I prefer the latter. These days I tend to use a rather vague, though perhaps more tangible, definition of: “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” (Charlesworth 2014). These definitions reveal a conviction on my part that (a) social media existed long before the digital revolution made it a cultural phenomenon, and (b) social media is not social media if the content is published on the writer’s own website. A caveat to this is that it is an indication of the uncertainty as to what social media actually is that even the author of books on social media can confuse the issue. Sharp-eyed readers will notice that later in this tome I list blogging as being an aspect of social media, and yet it is not unusual for a blog to appear on its author’s own website and/or domain name.

At this point it would be sensible to offer the reader other pertinent definitions—and I will, once another issue is addressed. In the previous paragraph I treated social media as a noun, but it might also be considered that in the term social media, media is a noun and social is its adjective. I’ll stick with it being a noun, but as has become in the case with the word data, a noun that can be used as singular or plural without English scholars getting too upset. I doubt you will have seen Facebook described as social medium, or as I say in this book social media is, not social media are. Ho hum, let’s move on and hope that sometime in the future historians can write: “eventually the digital people got their act together and came up with a definition for social media with which everyone agreed.”

I’ll end this section by throwing another spanner into the metaphorical definition works. The definitions presented refer to websites—but websites could just as easily be replaced with tools. Or when social media is conducted on mobile devices, apps. And in a class yesterday I found myself using the term platforms to describe Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al. So I looked up the technical meaning of the word and got this from techopedia.com: “A platform is a group of technologies that are used as a base upon which other applications, processes or technologies are developed.” In personal computing, a platform is the basic hardware (computer) and software (operating system) on which software applications can be run. From my less-than-technical point of view isn’t that everything on a computer? However, referring to platforms has a sensible ring to it—and I can even elicit the support of Mark Zuckerberg on this as he has described Facebook as a platform.¹

So what other definitions of social media are out there? Two from old school dictionaries are: “forms of electronic communication (such as Web sites) through which people create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, etc;” (Merriam-Webster) and “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking” (Oxford Dictionaries). These are similar, with an emphasis on networking and communities. Cambridge University Press offer up: “websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information on the internet using a computer or mobile phone.” This definition seems a bit, well: loose. “Computer programs?” In this context, isn’t that software? Or do they mean apps? And “communicate and share.” Does that mean communicate in order to share or communicate as well as share? Or both? But their example of the term used in a sentence then takes us on a tangent to the definition by saying: “companies are increasingly making use of social media in order to market their goods.” I’ll come on to social media marketing in Chapter 3, but it is generally accepted that social media is, was, and always will be, for people to “communicate and share information.” That organizations have hijacked it to carry marketing messages should not take us away from the original concept.

Dictionary.com also uses a business example rather than a social one in its sample sentence (“many businesses are utilizing social media to generate sales”) after its more societal definition of: “websites and other online means of communication that are used by large groups of people to share information and to develop social and professional contacts.” If I was to be picky on this one, I ask what “large” is in this context.

Moving away from traditional sources into the digital arena, that doyen of crowd-sourced information, Wikipedia states that: “Social media are computer-mediated technologies that allow the creating and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.” However, it follows the theme of this chapter by adding: The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition. Techopedia (techopedia.com) is far more helpful for the purposes of this book, not least by offering examples, when it says:

Social media is a catch-all term for a variety of Internet applications that allow users to create content and interact with each other. This interaction can take many forms, but some common types include:

• Sharing links to interesting content produced by third parties

• Public updates to a profile, including information on current activities and even location data

• Sharing photos, videos, and posts

• Commenting on the photos, posts, updates, videos, etc. shared by others.

Worth noting is that the first in this list describes the original use of the term blog, where—in the days before search engines—surfers would seek out lists of websites that had been compiled by bloggers. Not unlike the nature of many contemporary blogs, these bloggers were showing off to newbie surfers by saying: “check me out, I’ve been to all these sites before you.” Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) further 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 requires us to consider yet another misunderstood—and misused—term from the digital lexicon, Web 2.0. Kaplan and Haenlein were not the first to make this connection, however. In their influential 2006 book Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams drew popular attention to a 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 the communities and participation. Constantinides and Fountain (2008) followed this up with a paper that gave a definition of Web 2.0 which might also be used to describe social media. They said that: “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.” They went on to identify that social media had potential for business, however, in that it presented businesses “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), Table 1.1 shows the four levels of content on the web that will help readers understand the concept 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. The crossover to social media in the four quadrants shows how web content moves from that controlled by the organization through to that over which it has no control (Charlesworth 2014).

McConnell and Huba (2007) suggest that social media is not about the technology, but instead: “the sum total of people who create content online, as well as the people who interact with it or one another.” A different slant is offered by Bryan Eisenberg (2008) who puts forward the notion that the various elements that make up social media do not actually represent media but: “a platform for interaction and networking,” which raises the issue of whether we are trying to define the publisher of the communication or the content of that communication?

Table 1.1 The four levels of content on the web

	HOME WEB 2	EXTENDED WEB 2
Two-way (horizontal web)	In this square communication is two-way from the organization to the customers—but is controlled by the organization. It is made up of the organization’s own blogs and forums.	Elements of this square are those most often associated with Web 2.0. These are the sites over which organizations have no control and people talk to one another. It includes individual’s blogs, social network sites, traditional forums or discussion areas, Q & A pages, and sites such as Wikipedia.
	HOME WEB 1	EXTENDED ...