504 Part Three Executing and Evaluating the Campaign

movies, TV channels, cruises, and more. In recent years social sites

have found ways to charge brands and organizations for their pages,
but the challenging part remains the need to continually create and
update these presences with engaging content that doesn’t bore or
overwhelm the audience. The biggest reason “unfollowing” happens
on Twitter is overtweeting.
Going back to our Disney example, with so many brands and
so many avenues to deploy their owned presence, managing the
fragmentation is resource-intensive and requires several policies
and procedures to ensure accurate portrayal of the brand in these
arenas. But like everything else in our new technology era, where
there’s a headache, aspirin is being made. Buddy Media (owned
by Salesforce) and Hootsuite are two young companies that help
brands and agencies take control of all their social presences
from one dashboard. They provide analytics and measurement
tools that help define success from every promotion, tweet, poll,
or other content mechanism that is deployed. Trend analysis will
help brands explain the effects of every action they take on social
media sites.
Listening tools, discussed later in the chapter, also are beneficial
in understanding what’s going on in the blogosphere (the aggregation
of all blogs online). For example, how is a company’s brand being
talked about, and is it negative or positive? Text analytics—the mea-
M&M’s, liked by over 10 million followers, builds engagement with fans
surement and analysis of text-based user-generated content (UGC)—is
through Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and other social sites.
a burgeoning field in the social space, giving rise to unprecedented
Source: Mars, Incorporated/Facebook
insights from the mere words and syntax we use when expressing our
opinion about a product, brand, or service on the internet.
These tools help make the fragmentation of social media a bit easier to manage; how-
ever, the tools are only as good as the people using them. Therefore, it is still a very labor-
intensive way of connecting with an audience.

Building Social Social media bring a new element into advertising and marketing—the human element.
This means that the consumers know they can connect with actual people from a com-
Authority pany in real time. The effect is that a relationship is started between consumers and brand
that can elevate the perception of the company as an authority in the area where they are
selling their products or services. The subsequent increase in brand favorability increases
Copyright © 2020. McGraw-Hill US Higher Ed ISE. All rights reserved.

LO 15-4 the likelihood of a sales increase too. This is what most companies strive for when adding
social media into the media mix. However, building authority is not as easy to accomplish
as it is to describe. As we discussed earlier with the mommy bloggers and Motrin, it is
sometimes hard to predict the outcomes of the human interactions, just like in the physi-
cal world.

Transparency and Best practice in social media encourages openness, transparency, and authenticity. As
Brian Stolis, principal at Altimeter Group, wrote in Forbes, “I actually see businesses
Authenticity changing how they approach social media to deliver value to the customer.”21 What Stolis
means is that historically, value was an expression of the relative cost of a product or ser-
vice being advertised. Nowadays value goes beyond just the pricing or product and ex-
tends into the customer’s life, perhaps in many different ways, such as Nike creating a
running social network to connect more joggers together under the Nike brand. This ser-
vice doesn’t directly sell shoes, but it connects the brand with the heart of the customer in
such a way that the brand is linked to his or her passion. This is a very powerful and
emotional attachment that is unmatched by the more in-your-face promotional messages
of other media.

Arens, William, et al. Contemporary Advertising : And Integrated Marketing Communications, McGraw-Hill US Higher Ed ISE, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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Created from swin on 2024-12-21 08:26:24.
 Chapter 15 Social Media 505

However, many companies aren’t built to be as open and connected

as social media platforms demand. These companies need to figure out
whether, if they cannot embrace openness, it’s worth their participation
in the media. And then what? Do they walk away from social media as a
viable marketing tactic? Or do they fundamentally change their business
philosophy to encourage conversations in social media?

Two-Way Brand Communication

Market research is nothing new to brands. Understanding the perspective
of the target audience has helped brands create better products, services,
and communications. However, the instantaneous feedback mechanism
that social media provide is new and is so immediate that most compa-
nies, until recently, haven’t been able to handle the demands of social
media. Consider that just 10 years ago, getting information about how a
brand’s audience felt about its product required weeks to recruit, admin-
ister, compile, and report the findings. Now it can happen within sec-
In social media, the only thing needed to build a following is
creativity, passion, and a sense of what audiences find interesting. onds by just typing a few key words into a social listening tool and poof,
Red Bull was one of the first brands to take advantage of you have information not only about the brand, but also about the com-
Instagram’s advertising platform. Its campaign involved posting petition, the category, and the industry. Best of all, you can assess senti-
both its own images and those of its many followers. ment based on the syntax of the text.
Source: Red Bull It has also been known that word of mouth (WOM)—for example, a
friend’s recommendation—is the most effective form of communication
in persuading a future sale. In social media, WOM is replicated on sites that post user re-
views. Here audiences can find detailed and helpful perspectives on businesses of all kinds.
This kind of social intelligence rewards businesses that provide value. It also punishes busi-
nesses that fail to serve customers well.
Just how important are reviews in social media for local businesses? Bright Local,
which surveys consumers annually, reports that 86 percent of consumers read reviews
for local businesses and 27 percent use the internet to find a local business every day.
A local business looking to cultivate trust should know that consumers require an
average of 10 reviews before they find business ratings to be credible. Over half of all
consumers will only frequent a business if it has four stars or higher. And among
young consumers, aged 18–34, 9 out of 10 trust online reviews as much as a friend’s
recommendation.22
Social media platforms are tools that amplify WOM and make it measurable. A brand
can now know how often an asset (link, photo, video, promotion) has been shared and how
Copyright © 2020. McGraw-Hill US Higher Ed ISE. All rights reserved.

many people it has reached. This makes social media very powerful in their ability to move
the proverbial needle on WOM recommendations. Most brands want to figure out how to
encourage that behavior, and social media provide that platform. Through branded pages,
Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and others can engage in the conversation and hopefully
move the conversation in the right direction.
But brands need to be very clear on what it means to be truly authentic and truly
transparent. Clearly, it would make bad business sense for a company to be 100 percent
transparent or authentic because chances are its competition is listening. Besides that, we
are dealing with humans, and humans have a tendency to say one thing and mean an-
other. Consider the word convenience as an explanation for banking services. For different
people that word means different things; it might mean that the bank makes it easy by
offering mobile services, or that the bank is located nearby for easy walk-in service, or that
the bank has customized the experience especially for the individual customer. All of
Driving traffic to a brand’s website is not the
sole purview of Google. Facebook’s “Click to
those elements are convenient, so it isn’t enough to just suggest that authenticity and
website” posts can accomplish the same transparency are the tent poles of the business’s social strategy. The brand needs to define
objective. how authentic and transparent it is going to be, and typically what this two-way communi-
Source: Facebook cation really offers is an opportunity for the brand to be helpful in its own way (authentic)

Arens, William, et al. Contemporary Advertising : And Integrated Marketing Communications, McGraw-Hill US Higher Ed ISE, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/swin/detail.action?docID=6110564.
Created from swin on 2024-12-21 08:26:24.
 506 Part Three Executing and Evaluating the Campaign

and not just push promotional offers, but rather give the customer greater opportunity to
explore behind the scenes with the product or service (transparency).

Customer Service As we suggested in the last section, being helpful is a very powerful mechanism for a com-
pany to engender trust and loyalty within a customer base. This was evidenced by Zappos.
in Social Media com, Comcast, and many other brands that utilize social media as an extension to their
customer service efforts.
Log in to Twitter and search @comcastcares, and you’ll find a stream of questions,
comments, and statements from customers to @comcastcares with near-immediate re-
sponses. There are even updates from the Comcast Twitter feed when they are stepping
away from the computer for a few minutes so no one gets angry if Comcast doesn’t reply
right away. What started out as a project quickly became an initiative for reducing support
costs at the company.
Other companies like Casper provide forums for their customers to self-support. They
will even bring in top volunteer commenters to be “beta customers” on new products and
services, asking for their valued feedback. This keeps the customers happy, and the beta
customer now feels obligated to help others and to maintain goodwill within the forum of
frustrated and irate customers. By playing to the ego of some of these top influential cus-
tomers, DirecTV customer service reps, who are usually not as knowledgeable on technical
issues, deal with a lot fewer customer issues, saving millions of dollars a year.
Consider the implications of this story. A man arrives late to the Four Seasons hotel
in Palo Alto and gets bumped to a room that doesn’t meet his standards. Not happy about
this, he tweets his displeasure. The Four Seasons sees the tweet immediately and rectifies
the situation. As it turns out, the guest visits Palo Alto nearly 60 times a year. He then
tweets his pleasure, and the Four Seasons has just created a loyal customer.23 Prior to the
advent of social media, the guest would have channeled his frustration in ways that the
hotel could never have known about, and could possibly have lost him as a guest forever.
As the best-selling author and creator of @comcastcares, Frank Eliason, says, social media
mark the end of business as usual.

How Social Media Have There are countless ways to describe how social media are changing the business environ-
Transformed Business ment. The flurry of engagement created by social media is not useful for branding alone. It
has real consequences for revenues from e-commerce. Here are some demonstrations of
how social media platforms continue to push the boundaries of what is standard practice:
■■ Financial and credit brands invest heavily in Facebook ads to target Millennials.
■■ Local businesses, able to capitalize on current events and local concerns, frequently
have an advantage over big brands in social media.
Copyright © 2020. McGraw-Hill US Higher Ed ISE. All rights reserved.

■■ Comcast has at least 11 full-time employees dedicated to customer service via social
media sites.
■■ Dell attributes well over $6.5 million in revenue directly from Twitter.
■■ JetBlue website visitors who also visited Twitter were 35 percent more likely to
complete a booking than visitors who did not visit Twitter.24
■■ 36 percent of social media users post brand-related content.
■■ 85 percent of small to medium-sized firms use Twitter to provide customer service.
■■ 25 percent of U.S. marketers run video ads on Instagram.25
■■ 75 percent of companies now use Twitter as a marketing channel.
■■ 41 percent of the class of 2011 used social media sites in their job search.
■■ Over 5 million businesses rely on Facebook advertising, up from 3 million as
recently as 2016.26
■■ The average user spends almost 50 minutes a day on Facebook’s channels
(Facebook, Instagram, Messenger).27
■■ Twitter advertising options include promoted tweets that cost up to $2 an
engagement and promoted trends that run to $200,000 a day.28

Arens, William, et al. Contemporary Advertising : And Integrated Marketing Communications, McGraw-Hill US Higher Ed ISE, 2020. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/swin/detail.action?docID=6110564.
Created from swin on 2024-12-21 08:26:24.