Everyday more and more companies discover the great power of social media. Businesses adopt different approaches as part of their IMC strategies, attempting to build and maintain a strong and lasting relationship with their consumers. Those who overlook this trend of company-customer communication are doomed to very soon falling behind their progressive competitors.

This phenomenon, for the most part, is explained by the simple fact that contemporary consumer likes to be heard (notably, 20 years ago customer would be able to share her satisfaction/concern with just several other people, whears today she can easily reach millions). Yet, company-customer relationship can go far beyond simple feedback forms. G.Mangold and D.Faulds in their paper “Social media: the new hybrid element of the promotion mix” provide a delicious recipe of strong consumer engagement:

- Provide networking platforms

- Use blogs and other social media to engage customers

- Use both traditional and Internet-based promotional tools to engage customers

- Provide information

- Be outrageous

- Provide exclusivity

- Design products with talking points and consumers’ desired self-images in mind

- Support causes that are important to consumers

- Utilize the power of stories

In short, the advice is to foster engagement of consumers with your product: support communities and causes, organize sweepstakes, competitions and voting, fulfill wishes and dreams. On my behalf, I’d just add: be creative; contribute constantly and consumers pay off will be three-fold.

“The one sin for which there is no forgiveness is ennui” – O.Wilde

Avoid ennui, be interesting, while building the image of your company in Social Media,  advice A.Kaplan and M.Haenlinen in their paper “Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media”.

This article briefly discusses the potentials and the drawbacks of Social Media used as a marketing strategy. It opens with definition of Social Media versus such well-known but often misinterpreted concepts as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. After that, it suggests categories for classification of Social Media, namely social presence/media richness and self-presentation/self-disclosure. All existing online applications are then put under this classification in six general terms: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Ten short advices for companies aiming at utilizing Social Media close the article.

Overall, in my opinion, the article does not contain any truly significant findings as such, but rather embodies an engaging list of present-day and recent Social Media marketing campaigns.

Out of many campaigns described in the article my most favorite was the Burger King’s “Whooper Sacrifice”, in which tens of thousands facebook users agreed to exchange 10 of their network friends to a single burger. Whereas the common facebook-app encourages users to engage more of their friends, this campaign use quite opposite methods, nevertheless reaching a broad audience.

One particular phenomena discussed in the article that drew my attention is the use of Social Media channels in brand communities formation processes. The idea of building a community from scratch very fast and with minimal expenses is as strongly appealing as arguable. Many companies have quiet successfully used Social Media to support and develop communities around their brands, but how many succeeded in creating them? If a group of consumers, regardless weather they already use company’s products or not, is not out there, connected by an idea or a goal into social “togetherness”, the chances of a company creating such a community by Social Media presence only are very low. In fact, the article discusses couple of such attempts, but doesn’t say a word about the level of their success.

Media:

-       Choose carefully

-       Pick the application or make your own

-       Ensure alignment of content and activities along different platforms

-       Integrate traditional media

-       Allow access for all, including company’s staff

Being social:

-       Be active

-       Be interesting (“no forgiveness for ennui”;)

-       Be humble

-       Be unprofessional (speak friendly language to customers)

-       Be honest

These are the ten advices from the authors for utilization of Social Media for a company on contemporary business scene. However the advice subject matter is such that hardly allows for robust strategy guidelines. Therefore, this list could be prolonged endlessly and shall be modified according to each particular case it is addressed to.

During last several decades a loud choir of scientists, fiction writers and environmental activists has been imperatively raising awareness of fierce cataclysms coming. Planet Earth treated with an immense love and care of human beings will soon go crazy with the climate and eventually become unfeasible for most of living creatures, including the “smarter” ones. Prior to that, fighting over last bits of healthy land, air and water, we’ll wipe out most of our kind, and the world will look like this:

We couldn’t know and it was hard to imagine that the real big wars coming are of entirely different nature. They grow with a weapon more loud and powerful than atomic bombs, the beast that no one can escape or hide from – INFORMATION.

Along with the change of means came change of form and essence, with wars and revolutions getting different, novel character. Yet, many do not recognize these as wars at all and consider online revolutions unattainable.

Malcolm Gladwell in his article “Small change. Why the revolution will not be tweeted” asserts that “social media can’t provide what social change has always required”. Drawing on examples from history, he claims that the main underlying principle of extreme social movements is not the ideological favor, but personal connection. When situation becomes threatening to one’s well-being, personal connection with the rebelling group is crucial to maintain believe and participation. Gladwell points out that so-called “Tweeter revolution” in Iran was nothing more than a mass media provocation, a strongly exaggerated myth that western journalists rooted in a single questionable source of information. Online communities have too weak ties to have their members contributing any big effort, let alone with risk.
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“Now it’s marketers who have to find value in the noise.” - Jessica Tsai

So how DO marketers make any sense of the enormous social noise nowadays? In her article “Taking the measure of social media” Jessica Tsai addresses similar question, discussing different approaches for GAUGING SOCIAL MEDIA.

One of the main roles in this new scene belongs to Meaurmentcamp Wiki- the movement, which aims to creating a set of open source resources that would allow interested parties to measure their social media communications online and offline. They categorize social media measurement characteristics to behavior, feelings and financial impact.

Meaurmentcamp Wiki also believes that there cannot exist an instrument that would be appropriate for every single case, but rather see this toolkit as constantly growing and developing.
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