stephforge

As we were asked to write a paper on marketing choosing a subject that deals with it i personally chose to talk about why it’s important for companies to use social networks, or at least to be present on the world wide web. So first of all i apologize for my mistakes because i’m french. Second of all i never followed a marketing course in my university, we just talked about why communication and advertisements are important for a company so i will try to give my point of view about this subject using the right references.

Social networks are a part of everyone’s life today holding a huge part in social life, activities but also companies’ strategies. Internet crossing all borders, those networks connect people all around the world allowing them to have social interaction but also to know more about each other’s online and “instantaneously”.

Facebook, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn are so many networks that connect people but also business manager all around the Earth.

But why does a company chose to integrate social networks into their marketing strategies.

Marketing gets a lot of definitions: it’s the management process which identifies, anticipates, and supplies customer requirements efficiently and profitably. (UK chartered Institute of Marketing)

It’s also seen as the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchange and satisfy individual and organizational objectives. (American Marketing Association)

For Jay Conrad Levinson”Marketing is not an event, but a process. . . . It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end. . . . You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause in it. But you never stop it completely”.

The most important think for a company it’s their consumers and the public that they can reach, all their marketing is based on how they are going to touch them.

The Vaughn matrix shows perfectly the kind of target that companies want to reach with their strategy; it can be the cognitive level, the affective level or the conative level that affects them, with the DAGMAR model we could probably more talk about awareness, knowledge, preference, conviction and purchase.

Marketing in the social media include a new rule: use mostly the net. Indeed this service is mainly free and is used to share and communicate. By using it they could reach more people, internet users that can rapidly become consumers, but also the global market. One of the most important things that a company should be able to consider is that internet is a world that is in continuous change and if their website can’t follow this change it can survive.

These key concepts can be abbreviated as follows: (Social Marketing Institute)

Action is the objective

The target audience is the focus

The exchange is critical

Segment markets

Use all four Ps

Analyze and beware of competition

Monitor and be flexible

So the main question that they should ask themselves could be: How can I reach most of the population?

A social network is defined as “a network of friends, colleagues, and other personal contacts” and moreover as an “online community of people with a common interest who use a Web site or other technologies to communicate with each other and share information or resources”.

Indeed it has become a real connection between people all around the earth, who can share, communicate, and even find a job thanks to internet. “Nobody owns the net; it is a communications medium spread across thousands (even millions) of computers worldwide, which operates independently of the telephone companies that supply its cable connections, of the governments in whose countries it resides, and even of the computer owners in whose machines data are stored. The net therefore operate under its own rules.”(Essentials of marketing, Jim Blithe,2005, third edition, page 323)

If we take a lot on certain kind of those social networks we can have some examples of this phenomenon.

Facebook is known to be a link between friends in which you can see what’s happening to your friends all around the planet and also talk to them whereas it was first created to regroup student of a specific campus in one country.

Skype was first a social network used by companies to communicate all over the world and also hired their employer or even fired them and became a network that everybody can use to communicate with their families or friends.

LinkedIn is a professional network that can “boost” your carrier and make you take contacts again with former professionals or even employees.

But it will probably be easier to see how far it goes with some numbers:

-Facebook had 600 million monthly active users in January 2011.

-Twitter has 24+ million unique visitors per month, with 500 million tweets per day.

-LinkedIn has 60+ million professionals worldwide, including all Fortune 500 companies.

Unique visitors per month, as of February 2010:

Facebook: 133,623,529 ; MySpace: 50,615,444 ;Twitter: 23,573,178 ;Linkedin: 15,475,890

Today even cellular, which are for most of them android, allowed you to use those networks if you download the correct applications like twitter, facebook, or Skype. This was so obvious that companies had to integrate those networks to their strategies and make everything to be on the World Wide Web.

But why are those networks essential for a company?

The strategy of a company depend on what it want to show about itself, what kind of products they want to sell and which consumers they want to reach and how.

But it’s kind of the main point that every company want to reach so what come as the second main point in their strategy, being different, to diversify the firm from competitors.

As I said in the previous paragraph, millions of people are connected, millions of potential consumers that you can easily reach if you are a member of those networks or if you can make a partnership giving them money to put advertisements about you company in their “Wall”.

In fact advertisements are a huge part of those networks and a real financial help for them but the main problem is that they are bothering the internet users and they aren’t “cool” if we quote Mark Zuckerberg.

Examples of a successful marketing strategy using social networks:

-Jimmy Choo’s founder launched an original campaign through “Foursquare” organizing a real treasure hunt in London streets. As you should know, Foursquare is, in short, a social network which enable people to show where they are and meet their friends or contacts there.By following the account @catchachoo on Twitter (another social network) and by following the “check-in” the internet users, who were able to figure out the place faster than the others, were winning a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes from the new collection.

-Coca-Cola did a successful campaign on Facebook proposing to create a bottle with the name of the consumer, for a fee, and taking a picture of it to participate to their commercial game “give us your best shot”. More than ever, Coca-Cola succeeds allowing people to be closer without being in the same place.

But it can also be bad for a company to use them if they don’t really know how to use them in a proper way. If we take the fizzy drink brand Orangina for example, which is well known for its controversial advertisements already received complaints for advert showing animals lapdancing, was then attack for having use Facebook to post on their page that a racist sentence about Harry Potter. So even if they wanted to be close to their consumers they should have been more careful about the way of using it.

In my opinion those kind of Brand which are using the lovemark strategy should be really wise as for the use of social networks because they can create another kind of feeling and regards through this and it can become a real problem for them if they break the trust of their consumers.

In conclusion we can say that social networks have become a real institution for companies which want to grow up fastly and be different from their opponents.

Integrating social CMR to their strategy, companies can reach the E-market and propose their services online and allow consumers to buy their products online establishing trust between them.

Notes:

-http://www.graphicsms.com/blog/877-social-networking-statistics-2010/

–http://www.journaldunet.com/management/marketing/marketing-reseaux-sociaux/nokia.shtml

–http://fr.locita.com/reseaux-sociaux/integrer-les-reseaux-sociaux-dans-votre-strategie-marketing/

–http://www.social-marketing.com/Whatis.html

-http://www.social-marketing.org/sm.html