Emergence of Social Media Marketing

Social media is a web based platform for social interaction. Social media uses

highly accessible, scalable publishing techniques and web based technologies to

transform and broadcast media monologue into social media dialogue. Andreas

Kalpan and Michael Haenlein define social media as “a group of internet based

applications that are built on ideological and technological foundations of web

2.0 which allows creation and exchange of user generated content”. The term

web 2.0 is a web application that facilitates interactive information sharing and

collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site gives its users free

choice to interact or collaborate with each other in a social media, in contrast to

a website where users (consumers) are limited to only passive viewing of

content which is created for them.

Due to advent of the above medium, Social Media Marketing has become the

recent addition to companies integrated marketing communication plan.

Integrated marketing communication is a principle organizations follow to

connect with their targeted markets. Integrated marketing communication

coordinates the elements of the promotional mix i.e. advertising, personal

selling, public relations, publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion to

produce a customer focused message. In the traditional marketing

communication model, the content, frequency, timing, and medium of

communication by the organization is in collaboration with an external agent,

i.e. advertising agencies, marketing research firms and public relation firms.

However the emergence of social media and web 2.0 has impacted the

organisations has impacted the way organisations communicate with their

customers, it allows organizations to build social and business connections and

share information with its customers.

Social media marketing programs normally centre on efforts to create content

that attracts attention, generate online conversations, and encourage readers to

share it with their social network. The message spreads from user to user and

presumably resonates because it is coming from a trusted source, as opposed to

the brand or company itself.

Social media has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with

internet access, opening doors for organisation to increase their brand awareness

and facilitate conversations with the customer directly. Additionally, social

media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform to organizations to implement

marketing campaigns. Organizations can receive direct feedback from their

customers and targeted markets. The most popular platforms in social media are

Twitter, YouTube, Face book, Linked In, Delicious, Digg, and MySpace. Some

70 percent of shoppers trust consumer opinions posted online. Face Book has

more than 350 million users, Twitter by some estimates, will have 26 million

users by the end of this year and YouTube is the third most popular website on

the internet. Many large organisations have already started to take social media
marketing very seriously, big organisations like Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Nokia,

Sony, and Indian Railway by now are prominent users of the this ploy of social

media marketing. In the days ahead companies cannot ignore take social media

marketing very flippantly. If organisations do not catch up with social media

marketing they will have to strive hard to catch up their competitors who will

prominently use social media marketing as one their marketing tool.

References

 www.socialmediamarketing.com

 W. Glynn Mangold, David J. Faulds. Social Media: The new hybrid

element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, the Journal of the

Kelly School of Business.

 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_marketing.