Academics wake up: The practitioner is again showing us the way in Social Media Marketing

In my previous post I made the point that marketing strategies based on social media actually work (something I keep saying to my students for more than four years). As another confirmation of this I suggest my readers to have a look in the way Domino's Pizza is using the Social media and how this strategy has resulted in higher brand preference but more importantly to higher sales. Ben & Jerry's story is similar: in this case the switch from email marketing (that I never personally found such a great idea as an example of push marketing) to social media marketing was something that their customers actually demanded! The bottom line in both cases is that the modern marketer can not afford any more to ignore the social media as an increasingly important area of activity. This goes hand in hand with the realization that some serious work and investment is required here (something very obvious if you read just these two cases).
For me these developments are very welcome as well as expected and I feel that the research efforts of my Spanish colleagues and myself as well as our Social Media Research Center initiative on pursuing academic underpinning of the social media marketing are proved to be in the right direction. This is sometimes at odds with the ideas of colleagues who review some of our article submissions: Recently one of them saw nothing new in a study identifying customer segments among social networking sites users. As far as I know there is no word about this in any marketing textbook and academic contributions in this subject can be counted in the fingers of one hand. Anyway the practitioners are showing us once more the way, something regrettable since it should be actually the other way around. The good thing is that slowly but surely the number of students and even PhD's interested in social media marketing is growing. This blog that started in December of 2007 is a modest contribution to this direction but still supports the view (expressed in the very first post) that Web 2.0 and Social media is something worth attention and scholarship

Interesting news for SMEs: Social Networking is a successful strategy

According to a just published study of Regus Media Center the adoption of social networking as business strategy by SMEs is growing: the main findings of the study:

•Social Networks are now actively used by between half and three quarters of companies worldwide for various networking functions


• However, 40% of companies globally have successfully used social networks to find new customers, scotching the comments of pundits who deny that such networks produce hard business outcomes

• The importance of these networks to marketing activities is witnessed by the fact that 27% of firms globally actively devote marketing budget to social networking activity in order to reach and retain existing customers

• Social networks are mainly used by business people to stay in touch with business contacts (58%), getting together with special interest groups (54%), finding out useful business information (54%), and organising/connecting/managing customer groups (51%)

• Surprisingly few business people (22%) have used business social networks to find a new job

• A hardcore of sceptics exists (34%) who do not believe business social networks will ever be a significant method of reaching customers and prospects, although this proportion may diminish as examples of successful practice are more widely publicised

• There is only a mild differential between the small, medium and large company usage of business social networks, revealing that usage patterns are largely company size neutral

• Of the specific industries surveyed, ICT, Retail, Media & Marketing and Consultancy were above average in their use of business social networks. Manufacturing, Financial Services and Healthcare were below average
Source: Regus Media Center https://www.regus.presscentre.com/Resource-Library/Social-Media-1cf.aspx

Effects of Social Media on customer behavior

In one of the first serious studies on the effect of Social Media on customer behavior Utpal M. Dholakia and Emily Durham measured the effect of being a Facebook friend of a business on the customer attitudes and perceptions. The study, published in the HBR was conducted in cooperation with Dessert Gallery (DG), a popular Houston-based bakery and café chain. Interesting stuff included in the presentations of the 39th EMAC Conference in Copenhagen

Health 2.0

An interesting video (I got accross in Corinne's twitter) about the potential and effects of the Internet and Social Media on Healthcare in The Netherlands. The video is in Dutch with English translation. The effects of Social Media on Healthcare is one of the research subjects for our students of the Social Media Research Center (SOMERE)
Hope to have some interesting research findings soon

Umair Haque's Efficient Community Hypotheis

With all the hype around Social Media and a number of running research projects on the issue of online communities and social networking it is not strange that I am interested in educated views on the subject. One of my regular sources is Umair Haque who posted an interesting article in his HBR blog of 16 April. It is titled "The Efficient Community Hypothesis" and for sure worth reading (mainly from managers who wonder what the Social Media really mean to them) . According to Umair:

"Markets need communities. Yesterday's institutions are collapsing around us. In their remnants and rubble lies a lesson. Perhaps the biggest reason 20th century institutions failed so badly is that they replaced communities with markets. Yesterday, the primacy of the EMH (Efficient Market Hypothesis) said: communities were historical anomalies, sources of friction and waste, unethical barriers to "free" trade and exchange. Today, the ECH says exactly the opposite: it is only when markets are held together by communities that markets can move past the boundaries of mere informational efficiency; that they can do more than just suck in "all known information," only to misprice everything from tech to houses to people to the future itself." (Umair Haque, http://blogs.hbr.org/ 16 April 2010)

Businesses that do not realize the power of communities and social networking will have a big problem coming to terms with the 21st century markets. This is also a fact requiring attention from all of us who instruct the marketers of the future. The issue comes tenaciously to my mind for some years now every September when the new season of teaching the essentials of Marketing starts for me.
To be continued.

A piece of advice to CEOs (and everyone else interested): The Social Media is not the silver bullet

The response of businesses to the Social Media as marketing tools is overwhelming. It is getting hard to find any company home pages that do not display proudly Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, RSS and other social links. To many managers the Social Media hype has triggered euphoric expectations and the illusion that jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon will magically solve all their problems and give them “competitive advantage”.

The countless Social Media aficionados and self-proclaimed “gurus”, “experts”, “evangelists”, “specialists”, and “prophets” I wrote about earlier are also contributing to the confusion; a very similar picture to the dot.com frenzy that some of us still remember but obviously many of us have already forgotten.

One of the big management fallacies (shared and distributed by most of the ignorant “experts”) is that the logos of the trendy apps on the web site will make customers believe that things have suddenly changed: our products got better, the customer service works, we listen to the customer. Some serious research is of course necessary here to see whether these management perceptions have anything to do with reality and whether the introduction of Social Media is really by itself leading to any improvements.

Until such evidence is available I would rather advice some cautiousness: the Social Media is not the silver bullet. I consistently explain to those who follow my lectures on the subject that the Social Media is only part of the solution. Other parts are the Customer Advocacy and the of course the Marketing strategy on different levels. I explain them that you should not start investing (or rather throwing) money in social Media strategies if you do not first address the issues in the (E)-Marketing Strategy Pyramid.

Borrowed from the well-known Hierarchy of Needs Maslow model my pyramid simply says that in order to be able to apply any Web 2.0 / Social Media strategies you should consistently address ALL lower levels of the model. In simple words you can not have Social Media ambitions with lousy products and customer service, a marketing organization in a permanent state of winter sleep and a dysfunctional web site that was last updated in the previous century.
Anecdotal evidence indicates that indeed such situations are not the exception. I recently read the post of Tom Davenport and the post of Umair Haque in the HBR blog that discuss the problem from different angles.
For those who want to address effectively some of the issues arising I have a few simple advices. Before you start talking about Social Media Marketing:

- Place yourself in the place of your customer
- Try to listen (and hear) the real customer voice
- If you have outsourced your customer service to a Call Center break today the contract with them (if possible). If you do not do this you can never apply the first two advices
- Look to your organization carefully and without bias (or maybe let someone else to look to it).
- Have you ever heard the terms CRM (not the software packages that are called so) and Customer Advocacy? If not go to Google (or maybe in an old fashion library) and try to find out something about them.

Predicting box-office film revenues using Twitter

Two researchers of Hewlett Packard's Social Computing Lab, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman just published a paper in the HP site presenting the findings of a study aiming at measuring the predictive value of the Twitter chatter in particular for estimating the revenues of movie films. The paper is not submitted to any journal yet, at least as far as I could understand.

Listening-in the customer voice is something I recommended as a way to use the Social Media as Marketing tools in my first published paper about this issue back in 2008. This new study provides new evidence of the value of the Social Media as marketing tools and I think that more studies will follow. Next to the high quality results obtained (the researchers claim that the Twitter-based predictions outperform traditional prediction methods) such research has also another advantage versus the traditional ones. It is much cheaper, something very interesting for businesses and mainly the small ones.

SUBWAY: Breakfast Crowdsourcing

There is almost no one who does not have heard about the term Crowdsourcing. For those who haven't an interesting paper from MIT Sloan Management Review.
As I have mentioned earlier this is the subject of an extensive literature review I do at this moment with the help of one of my students in the context of his Master Thesis within our Social Media Research center (SOMERE). The more you study this issue the more you see that businesses from the most different areas are exploring ways to boost their branding, sales and market shares using crowdsourcing. So SUBWAY could not be missing from the list. an interesting campaign.

Our paper is accepted in the EMAC 2010 conference

I just received the news that the paper we submitted * to the 39th European Marketing Academy (EMAC) Conference has been accepted. The paper is titled "ADOPTION OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES BY DUTCH USERS" and is about the factors influencing adoption of the SNS by the public on the basis of a Technology adoption Model (TAM) approach. The study was country-wide and has been also done in Spain so that we can make cross-cultural comparisons.
This is the first article from this study, some more aricles will hopefully follow.  For those interested the article will be available online right after the conference in this blog.

*Co-authors of this article are my Spanish colleagues Carlota Romero, Maria del Carmen Alarcón-del Amo and Miguel Ángel Gómez-Borja, all from the University of Castilla-La Mancha

Social Media for promoting the 2012 Olympic games

From the Independent On Sunday. I will try to follow the developments and keep you informed.

Associate Editor wanted for the European Conference on Information Systems 2011 (Finland)

For the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2011) (Finland) an Associate editor is urgently needed
Track title: Social media in customer relationship management.

The topics that this track intends to address include (i) exploring theory, concepts and frameworks for understanding consumers’ information needs, information search, and information practices in the context of a digital economy (ii) understanding the ways in which information systems enable or constrain consumers’ information search processes and/or their purchasing decisions (iii) evaluating consumers’ perceptions of the value (e.g. usefulness, ease of use) of information and communication systems in service contexts (iv) identifying the challenges for developing and implementing information and communication systems for consumers that take account of consumers’ requirements, behaviors, and practices.

Suggested topics include but are not restricted to:

• Theory, concepts and frameworks for understanding consumers’ information needs, behaviors, and practice in social media

• Innovation through consumer information services in social media, e.g. information and product search, recommender services, review systems, reputation systems, location based service provision

• Design principles for consumer information services e.g. information and product search, consumer interface design and interaction, consumer communities.

• Evaluation frameworks for consumer information services in social media e.g. acceptance models, usability models, rewards systems.

• Business use of ICTs and/or social media and the provision of sustainable services to consumers, e.g. developing and maintaining sustainable consumer communities, customer relationship management in a social media paradigm.

• Consumer communities and social media, e.g. customer empowerment and reputation management, design principles for consumer communities, consumer evaluations of consumer communities.

Those interested pls contact Angela Lin mailto:A.Lin@sheffield.ac.uk before Jan 29

Class of 2013: Computer Time Doubles That of TV Viewing

Some of the findings released from Alloy Media + Marketing’s 9th annual College Explorer report on behalf of Harris Interactive indicate the new ways college students are dealing with technology. One of the most amazing findings is that US students are expected to spend 12 hours per day engaged in some form of media by 2013; most of that time – 9.5 hours – will be spent with their “tech” gadgets, including computers, mobile devices, MP3 players, and gaming devices. This multi-tasking public is expected to spend $6.5 billion on technology-related items by 2013, including computers, mobile devices, MP3 players, and gaming consoles and devices; this segment is becoming less and less unaccessible to traditional push marketers. This group spends twice as much time on their computer than on TV.

Social Media: Twitter for customer service

Busy times as I mentioned in the previous post. At the moment together with my colleagues from the University of Castilla-La Mancha we conduct two surveys on adoption of social networks in Holland (following a similar study in Spain) and adoption of Social Media as marketing tools by retailers in Holland (Spain will follow). From the front the news are interesting, you feel also that the issue of Web 2.0 / Social Media keeps many people busy. I see every day new examples of engaging such media as part of the marketing; a nice example is BESTBUY's Twelpforce  a Twitter feed used for customer service and tech advice (the current tweet informs the iPhone owners about the iPhone virus that I heard about yesterday)

Busy times

The readers of this blog have most probably noticed that no post appeared in the blog the last 20 days. The reason: no time! The last weeks have been really hectic both professionally and personally. In the mean time many interesting things happen in the Web 2.0 /social media world, soon I will be back with new stories and comments. A taste of things happening in the Web 2.0 domain this video about Healthcare 2.0 ( this is by the way also subject of the Social Media Research Center of our University. Hopefully soon some fresh results form our research will be available in this blog

Health 2.0 2009 Opening Video from Health 2.0 on Vimeo.

The Social Media Tsunami

Most people are aware of the staggering growth of the Internet and the social media content (online sales, new web sites, blog posts, tweets, social network memberships etc). Yet it is hard to imagine what this growth really means and how the web is growing as you read this text. If you really want to get a good picture I advice Gary's Social Media Count