Customer engagement strategies in Social Media: The case of

Malaysian Automotive Industry

Kamisah Kormin, Rohaizat Baharun

Faculty of Management, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Johor Bahru
Email: kamisah.kormin@gmail.com, m-rohaizat@utm.my

Social media technology offers a new way of modern and powerful marketing strategy due to its
interactivity, popularity and audience reach. Industry managers are getting aware the importance of
social media adoption to engage their customers as the process to deliver value and strenghten
relationship. However, to what extant Malaysian industries engage with social media is still not known.
Therefore, this paper aimed to provide an overview of the use of social media for customer engagement
among Malaysian Automotive Industry and analysis of their success. Data collected through content
analysis method to the top 20 Malaysian automotive companie’s website and Facebook found that all
Malaysian automotive companies have at least one social media presence and Facebook is the most
popular platfrom among others. It indicated that the companies have begun to fully embrace the
enormous benefits that social media offers. However, despite their presence in multiple platforms and
highly responsive of their customer service, most of the company fails to attract sufficient customer
engagement that leads to the failure of their Facebook campaign. Lastly, suggestions to Malaysian
managers are also provided.

Keywords; social media, Malaysian companies, customer engagement, content anaysis, Facebook

1.0 Introduction

The growth of social media has dramatically reshaped the entire process of customer
engagement. The old way tactics of offline engagement such as inviting customers in
company’s events and telemarketing are still practical and relevant, however, its
popularity is now replaced by new tactic of engagement through online medium such
as social media. Social media has changed how companies communicate with
stakeholders; therefore it is important that companies learn how to take advantage of
this new media, especially for communication purposes. Social network sites seem to
provide tremendous opportunities for organizations to engage stakeholders in a dialogic
communication (Rybalko and Seltzer, 2010), discuss, share, listen to their opinion and
respond quickly to their critism. With the growing emphasis on social media, how to
effectively utilize this new media environment has become one of the most important
topics in public relations and marketing research.

Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) defined social media as a group of Internet-based

applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,
and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. From this
definition, social media can be divided into few categories such as business network
(eg; LinkedIn), Collaborative project (eg; Wikipedia), Microblog (eg; Twitter), Photo
sharing (eg; Flickr, Instagram), Video sharing (eg; YouTube, Vimeo), product review
(eg; Ebay, Amazon) and social network (eg; Facebook, Myspace).

Facebook has gained the highest popularity among Malaysian, especially for socialising
purpose, with almost half of Malaysian Internet users identifying it as their favourite
social platform (48%) and 88% visiting the site weekly. WhatsApp is not far behind for
weekly use, at 72% of Malaysian Internet users, however it’s the favourite platform for

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just one fifth of the population (19%). Malaysian is one of the most socially engaged
with social media in the world. The survey among 50,0000 in 46 countries made by
TNS’s Connected Life in year 2014 revealed that three fifths (62%) of Internet users in
Malaysia access social media networks daily, compared to 42% globally, whilst 52%
use instant messaging every day. Malaysians have an average of 233 friends in their
social network, followed by 231 in Brazil and 217 in Norway whereas Japanese users
had the least number of friends at an average of 29. High Internet penetration is may be
contributed to the highly social media engagement among Malaysian.

Table 1: Social media use in Malaysia

Weekly users - Malaysia Weekly users - global

Platform
(%) %

Facebook 88 47
YouTube 76 35
WhatsApp 72 22
Facebook Messenger 71 28
WeChat 61 30
Google + 52 28
Line 43 10
Instagram 36 11
Skype 36 15
Twitter 30 16
Yahoo! Messenger 30 12
Viber 21 7
LinkedIn 16 6
Tumblr 16 6
Snapchat 12 5

Source: TNS (2014)

According to the 2013/2014 Economic Report published by Ministry Of Finance

recently, the number of Internet users in Malaysia is expected to increase to 25 million
by 2015 from 18 million in 2012. The report said the rate of household broadband
penetration increased to 66.8 percent at the end of June 2013, while the mobile phone
penetration rate exceeds 100 percent, there are now 42.6 million subscribers. Statistics
also show that more Internet users in Malaysia are the buyer against the seller with a
market size of online transactions in Malaysia is expected to reach RM5 billion by 2014
compared to RM1.8 billion in 2010. Further stated in the report is that Malaysia is one
of the three core countries in Asia that actively use Internet for online shopping, for
instance; air tickets and hotel bookings as well as spearheaded the purchase of products
and services online. This statistic provides an evidance that an increasing number of
Internet users and online shoppers illustrate the potential of a huge market for online

2
business. In this regard, social media can play very important role for business
transaction and performance, that every companies must adopt to stay competitive and
for their own reputation.

Despite to the rapidly growing of Internet and social media usage among Malaysian,
the data of social media adoption among Malaysian companies is unknown due to scare
literatures of social media studies within Malaysia. Therefore, this paper has the
purpose to give an insight on customer engagement strategies in social media among
Malaysian companies focusing on Automotive industry, which the main aim is two
folds: First; analysis on social media platfrom used to engage customers and secondly,
their level of engagement and performance in Facebook campaign. With the significant
benefits that social media offers for increasing customer engagement and limited
literatures of social media practice in Malaysia, this paper is hope to add knowledge to
managers and academic scholar on the current scenario of social media engagement
within Malaysian Automotive Industry. The structure of the paper starts with literature
review, methodology used, finding of the study, discussion and recommendation to the
Malaysian managers.

2.0 Literature review

2.1 Social media

In recent years, social media have grown more quickly than other forms of digital media
(Tuten 2008). Not surprisingly, therefore, social media has attracted increasing interest
in both academic and practitioners. They wish to understand social media in order to
establish new ways in which to communicate with customers. Wikipedia defines Social
media as a computer-mediated tools that allow people to create, share or exchange
information, ideas, and pictures/videos in virtual communities and networks. While,
Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) defined social media as a group of Internet-based
applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0,
and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. Furthermore, social
media depend on mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive
platforms through which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and
modify user-generated content. They introduce substantial and pervasive changes to
communication between organizations, communities, and individuals (Kietzmann et
al., 2011). Agichtein et al (2008) came to a similar conclusion about social media; they
describe the term as “popular user-generated content domains that include blogs and
Web forums, social bookmarking sites, photo and video sharing communities, as well
as social networking platforms such as Facebook and MySpace, which offer a
combination of all of these with an emphasis on the relationships among the users of
the community”. Boyd and Ellison (2007) give a definition of the Social Network Site
as ”as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public
profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they
share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made
by others within the system.” To summarize the descriptions above, definitions of social
media center around three main fundamentals; web based technology, content provided
by the users; and dialogues and relationships among users of community.

2.2 Why and how company should engages with social media

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Customer engagement in social media (or popularly known as online customer
engagement) is an extension of the theory of customer relationship management. This
new theory has gained increasing attention due to the rise of social networking sites.
Customer engagement is context specific (Roderick et al., 2011), therefore; social
media is a context that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content
(Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010), represent a rich context for engagement manifestations,
as they foster the creation of strong, interactive consumer relationships (Gummerus et
al., 2012). One of the main objectives of firm engaging with social media is to attract
as much as customer engagement, increasing interaction and develops relationships
among them, which in turn add value to the brand as a whole. Most of the companies
now have engaged with social media to take advantage of the special features that are
not available or limited among traditional medium such as:

a. Cost factor

According to Weinberg (2009), the main advantage of social media marketing is

cost-related. Because of the financial crisis, firms try to find cheap solutions for
promoting their brand; social media allow them to make their brand better known
at a low cost ((Tsimonis and Dimitriadis, 2013). The financial barriers to social
media marketing are quite low compared to others (Hennig-Turau et al., 2010;
Ioakimidis, 2010; Abeza et al., 2013). This is due to the fact that the majority of
social media sites are free to access even for business use where the business can
create profile and post information. Apart from that, advertising cost is social
media for instance; through cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPI) and
click through rate (CTR) are very cheap. They can cost 40-60% less than ads on
traditional channels like print, television and radio (Calliduscloud, 2015). In
contrast to a TV campaign that can cost $100,000 to produce, a social media
advertisement on Twitter or Facebook for example, can cost as little as $1-$5 per
click (Calliduscloud, 2015).

b. Interact and develop relationship

In today’s interactive environment, two-ways communication or push-pull model

has replaced the old one-way communication push-model, where the power to
control the communication has shited from company (before), to the customers
(now). Therefore, if the brand wants to succeed in social media, the relationship
between brand and customer should be nurtured carefully. Marketing researchers
have noted the importance of generating more effective brand-consumer
interactions and engagement with respect to sales growth, superior competitive
advantage and profitability (Roderick et al, 2011). Investment in relationships
ensures the longevity of an organization’s positive reputation in a number of
important ways: (a) by helping to spread the word of newly released products, (b)
by providing useful feedback on products and services, (c) as an early warning
system for potential problems, and (d) through advocacy when problems do arise
(Alsop, 2004).

c. Create awareness

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 Social media can always be used to generate rapid awareness through customer
base by announcing and advertising in the network, driving the much needed
awareness to notify the new services and products (Danias and Kavoura, 2013)
as well as to publish and disseminate personal evaluations of products and
services (Chen et al., 2011).

d. Reach and Virality

The advantage that social media marketing has over offline methods is that the
potential number of people the firm can reach is much higher. Among traditional
sources of communication, social media have been established as mass
phenomena with a wide demographic appeal (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010). The
viral nature of social media means that each person who reads your posts has the
capability to spread the news farther within his own network, so information can
reach a large number of people in a short time (Weinberg, 2009). According to
ComScore (2011), for each incremental day branded content is published on the
brand Facebook page, reach among fans increases by 2.5%. Social media
currently have a far greater capacity for reaching the general public than do
traditional media, such as television, radio, and magazines (K. L. Keller 2009).
Many businesses have a limited customer base; with social media, they have the
chance to reach billions of users, both in and out of your geographic area. As for
2015, social media active users are over 2.206 billions or about 30% of total
populations in the world (Regan, 2015). This statistics provide strong evidance
that makes social media well worth for time, money and energy.

e. Lead generation

61% of US marketers have admitted that the main reason why their company has
implemented a Social Media strategy is to increase lead generation (Hubspot,
2012). Lead generation is a process to attract prospect customer. With the millions
of users connecting everyday on the different Social Media sites, every business
is bound to have some prospective customers somewhere on these sites.
Therefore, by gaining more and more followers online, brands can raise their
chances of generating new customers. According to Hubspot (2012), B2C
companies that blog generate 88% more leads per month than those who do not,
and B2B companies generate 67% more. Similarly, a study conducted by
ComScore (2011) indicated that the advertiser’s ads in websites increased by an
average of 94% the likelihood that users will conduct a search using keywords
related to the brand. Therefore, there is no doubt that any business implementing
a Social Media Marketing strategy will benefit of leads generation. This type of
behavior is particularly relevant among today’s younger teen and 20-something
consumer who is active on social media platforms and whose brand preference is
heavily influenced by friends and peers (Haven, 2007). Companies hope to
engage with loyal consumers and influence individuals’ perceptions about their
products, spread information, and learn from and about their audience (Brodie et
al. 2013).

f. Financial performance

Aggressive and effective use of social media marketing is proved to have positive

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 impact on financial performance of the company. A study conducted by DEI
Worldwide (2008) revealled that: 70% of consumers have visited social media
sites to get information, 49% of them have made a purchase decision based on
information they got from social media. Similarly, in 2009, Altimeter Group, a
leading digital media consultant and in cooperation with the WETPAINT, a social
content hosting company, conducted a study entitled Engagementdb: Ranking the
Top 100 Brands (2009) among 100 world’s top brands, in an atempt to find a
correlation between a brand’s social engagement and its financial performance.
Their study found that the brands most heavily engaged in Social Media
Marketing show 18% revenue growth as compared to 6% revenue decline for the
brands that were not engaged.

Choosing the right strategies is the key of successful engagement. The first thing that
is considered very important strategy is to choose the most appropriate social media
platform (Socialmediatoday, 2014; Tsimonis and Dimitriadis, 2013; Kaplan and
Haenlein, 2010) as the popularity of social media varies across country. For instance;
Sina weibo is the most popular platform in China, with around 280 million active users
and 500 million registered users (SocialmediaToday, 2014). The government restriction
of the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in China, may be support the popularity of local
version of social media platform; including Sina weibo. However, in Malaysia, Sina
weibo is almost not known, but Facebook has gained tremendous popularity. Another
important strategy is the company’s proactiveness in generating content (or also known
as post) in their selected social media platform. Since, social media are all about sharing
and interaction, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) adviced the companies to be active by
ensuring that the content is always fresh and that the companies engage in discussions
with their customers. Content (or also known, brand post/message) is a nucleus and
main attraction of any social media marketing. Content is defined by Kliatchko (2009)
as the link with “participatory media”, in which people are active participants of the
creation of message. Content is a powerful strategy to attract customer engagement in
firm’s social media and as emotional tie if it is written and presented in attractive and
compelling manner. Therefore, to achieve higher customer engagement, every
company must update their content regularly (Ashley and Tuten, 2015; Verisign, 2015),
or in average, once per day for big brands, however, Matista (2015) suggest that for
small brand, they must update the facebook content around five time per day to have a
better chance to appear in user’s news feed. Updated social media content creates real
value and interaction for customers or fan, where they feel that they are really getting
something out of following the brand page (such as new product information, questions
and comments that are answered to), and that the brands are worth having a relationship
with (twentyfoursocial, 2013). By producing fresh content in social media interactions
with customers, marketers would foster customers’ social media engagement with the
brand and better meet customers’ needs (Rohm and Kalhcheva, 2013).

On the companies’ blogs, pages and profiles, customers can leave feedbacks,
expressing their true thoughts and feelings about a company and its products and
services, as well as to request help and support. In this regard, firm’s customer service
play an important role to respond as feedback encourages further dialog and interaction,
which helps manage conflict more effectively, improves understanding for both
stakeholder and organization, and addresses stakeholder concerns (Doerfel et al., 2003)
and the responses should be cordial, clear, and detailed (Bennett and Martin, 2008) to

6
avoid frustration not only by the information seeker or commentor, rather by other
members in the community, which may lead them to disseminate negative comment to
the firm in online or offline platform. Therefore, the solvation of an issue in a
satisfactionary manner is important strategy to foster customer engagement, loyalty and
trust.

2.3 The role of customer engagement and the success of social media campaign

When using social media for marketing campaign, it is not only important to set
objectives, but also to measure its success by using relevant metrics (Hoffman & Fodor
2010; Peters et al. 2013). Measurement is critical and confusing since there is no unifed
view amongst academic and practitioners on the best formula but it understood that it
is difficult to use financial data the measure the success. For example, Blanchard (2011)
claimed that there is still no clear evidence to prove that 10,000 new followers/fans on
the firm’s social media account will lead to 8,000 new customers, and $2 million
increase in firm’s sales revenue. Further, he proposed that the metric should involve
multiple layers of data analysis to connect both financial (i.e. 16% increase in online
sales) and non-financial (i.e. increase in positive mentions) outcomes of the campaign.
This view is supported by Vaynerchuk (2011), when he argues that social media
engagement mostly involve human interactions (i.e. positive/negative reviews, Word
of Mouth), which cannot be calculated using mathematical calculation. Murdough
(2009) urge that a ‘social media measurement process’ should have five stages –
concept (definie what trying to accomplish), definition (creating an outline of how
social platforms could be leveraged to reach and interact with target audience to support
objectives), design (lays out specific tactics
and venues most appropriate for brand’s active social media presence), deploy
ment (focus is on ensuring that what is being seen and transpiring in social venues is
what is expected) and optimisation (all the work done in the previous four steps comes
together in the form of reporting and insight to evaluate the social program
performance). Further, he suggests that the metric use to measure social media success
is depending upon firm’s goal. For instance; if the firm goal is to deepen customer
relationship, therefore the metric used should be the number of advocates (eg; fan,
followers) and number of comment posted. For this reason, practitioners would opt to
use customer engagement as their key metric to access the performance of their social
media marketing. Such metrics for social media applications include but are not limited
to the number of visits, tags, page views, members/fans, impressions, incoming links,
impressions-to-interactions ratio, and the average length of time visitors spend on the
website.

2.4 Summary

The literature review demonstrates that social media offers tremendous benefits for the
company if the right strategies are well prepared and applied. The right selection of
social media plaform, content strategy and efficency of customer service are among the
most critical aspect that every company must take into high consideration before
decision is made to engage with customers in social media. Once the company decides,
it would be meaningless if the company does not measuring their campaign
performance. Due to difficulty to link the success with financial measure, the use of
customer engagement behavior such as number of fan and number of engaging fan are
the most commonly proposed by an academic researchers and practitioners, as after all

7
company’s main focus is conversion, which means how well consumers’ involvements
on the social media platform affect their buying decisions. Statisics showed in chapter
one is an evidance that social media has been widely used by Malaysian for multiple
purposes, especially for socializing with friends and family. However, the present social
media strategies adopted by the Malaysian Automotive Industry and their performance
is not known. Therefore, this paper seeks to answer the following research questions:
1). What kind of social media platform presently used by Malaysian Automotive
Industry to engage with the customers/shareholders 2). How regular they update their
Facebook content 3). Do their customer service in Facebook play efficiently and 4).
Are they succeessful in their Facebook campaign? This paper intends to answer these
questions and provide preliminary evidence on the current customer engagement
strategy in social media within Malaysian Automotive Industry.

3.0 Methodology

Twenty (out of twenty nine) passenger cars registered with Malaysian Automotive
Association were selected for analysis. Data collection were conducted in two stages;
First, we content analyze the company’s website to examine the social media platform
used for customer engagement. The data was then coded into 1 – if present or 0 – if
absence. In stage two, quantitative content analysis again was adopted to empirically
investigate the level of customer engagement in their official Facebook page. One
month data; July 2015 of all the selected company was retrieved in one day, due to the
rapidly changing of social media data. Two coders were then asked to code and analyze
the data by using the coding sheet prepared for this study. Four most popular and
important metrics to measure level of customer engagement behaviours and their
Facebook performance were selected:
a. No. of fan : Number of fan who ‘like’ brand’s Facebook
b. Total engagement : No. of actual fan who really ‘engage’ and interact with the
brand such as ‘liking’, commenting’ and ‘sharing’ brand post with others
c. Engagement rate (ER) : Percentage of (Total engagement divided by number of
fan)
d. Post per month : Total number of post in a month

The performance of the company’s customer service was rated by the coders into three
categories; excellent, good and poor. The coders used their own judgement based on
the number of complaints and queries responded and the tone or language used by the
customer service. According to LikeAlyzer.com, Facebook campaign is said to be
successfull if enggagement rate exceeds 7%. This study will use this benchmark to
determine the succees or failure of Facebook campaign. The agreement between coders
was 87%, which is above the minimum average 80% for inter-coders reliability
(Lombard et al, 2002; Hayes and Krippendorff, 2007). Therefore, the result of this study
was deemed reliable.

4.0 Finding of the study

The result as depicted in Table 2 shows that all the company (analysis made by the car
brand) has at least one social media presence, in which Facebook (100%) is the most
popular one, followed by Youtube (72%), Twitter (35%), Instagram (20%), LinkedIn
(5%) while others is only 15%. The most engage company in social media is Naza Kia

8
Malaysia (6 plaforms), after that Nissan, Mercedez Benz and Peugeot (4 platform),
while the least engage companies are Suzuki, Renault, Lexus and Mazda with only
using Facebook platform. Suprisingly, Honda being one of the most popular and the
fourth highest car sales in year 2014 (Malaysia Automotive Association, 2015), only
choose to have one platform, Facebook. Average of social media platform used in this
industry is three.

The result of company’s performance in Facebook is presented in Table 3. Till July

2015, Honda has successfully attract the highest number of fan in Facebook, while Naza
Kia in the second and Toyota in the third place. The least popular company is Renault
with only be able to generate nineteen thousand fans. Honda, being the most popular
company, however, fails in Facebook campaign as they only able to attract 1.52% of
their fan to socially engage in their Facebook. As can be seen from the data, only BMW
and Mercedez Benz succeeds in their campaign while the rest of the companies far
behind the satisfactory level. The most highly engage company in terms of number of
post is Suzuki with 27 posts were shared in July, 2015 and the most least engage
company is Mazda with only 2 posts shared in that month. Of 20 companies, 17 of them
having excellent customer service, 1 (Nissan) was rated good and two (Mercedez and
Hyundai) were rated poor in their customer service.

Table 2: Social media plaform used by the selected company (brand)

Brand name FB TW YT INS LN Other Total

 
BMW    3

9
  
 
Proton 2
Ford 2

   
Honda 1
Nissan 4
  
   
Toyota 3
Naza Kia 6
 

Perodua 2
Suzuki 1
  
 
Volkswagen 3
Mitshubishi 2
   
  
Mercedez Benz 4
Chery 3
   

Peugeot 4
Renault 1
  
  
Citroen 3
Volvo 3

 
Mazda 1
Hyundai 2
Lexus  1
Total 20 7 70 4 1 3
(100%) (35%) (72%) (20%) (5%) (15%)
Data as 31 July, 2015

Note: FB – Facebook, TW-Twitter, YT-Youtube, INS-Instagram, LN- LinkedIN,

Other-Corporate Blog, Flickr, Google+

Table 3: Company’s performance in Facebook

Brand name No. of Total ER Total CS CP

fan engagement (%) post

BMW 232K 20,762 8.95 19 E S

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 Proton 333K 61 0.02 22 E F
Ford 71K 397 0.56 12 E F
Honda 939K 14,944 1.59 17 E F
Nissan 450K 1,541 2.44 14 G F
Toyota 621K 2,149 2.81 10 E F
Naza Kia 645K 12,778 1.98 14 E F
Perodua 144K 1,589 1.10 18 E F
Suzuki 222K 1,814 2.93 27 E F
Volkswagen 467K 1,446 0.31 17 E F
Mitshubishi 349K 2,824 0.81 18 E F
Mercedez Benz 214K 22,278 10.41 20 P S
Chery 6528 19 0.29 3 E F
Peugeot 478K 20,850 4.36 18 E F
Renault 19K 879 4.62 10 E F
Citroen 103K 497 0.48 10 E F
Volvo 155K 3,179 2.05 13 E F
Mazda 98k 253 0.26 2 E F
Hyundai 97K 167 0.17 5 P F
Lexus 207K 6,180 2.99 18 E F
Note: ER (Engagement Rate), RR (Response rate), [CS (Customer service): Excellent
(E), Good (G), Poor (P) and [CP (Campaign performance) = Fail (F), Success (S)]

5.0 Discussion and suggestion to the managers

There are many interesting conclusion can be made with regard to the results of this
study, in which the discussions are divided into the following topic:

5.1 Social media use

All companies in the sample use at least one platform to engage with customers in
which Facebook is the most popular platform, not only among Malaysian but within
the Automotive Industry as well. The result shows that Malaysian companies in this
industry are fully aware the importance use social media and they alert with current
technology trend to stay competitive. Hundreds (or, may be thousands) of social media
made for free are available in the market, but in the context of small population country
like Malaysia, three social media is considered sufficient. The most important thing in
social media strategy is not relied on the quantity of the platform use, but on the quality
and proactiveness of their strategy. Each social media platform usually attracts a certain
group of people, therefore, firms should be active wherever their customers are present
(Kaplan and Hainlein, 2010). Therefore, managers should opt to use only platform that
most widely use among Malaysian as such Facebook, YouTube and Whatssup (See
Table 1 for referrence). Unfortunately, none of the company in the sample uses
Whatssup as their option, eventhough Whatssup has been rated as the third most
popular platform for socializing in Malaysia.

Corporate blog is another significant platform to generate greater engagement and leads
that all the company fails to use. Many managers may have uncertainties or
misconceptions as to the value of corporate blog. Some may be believe that too much
time and effort will be required to effectively implement a corporate blog platform into

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their existing promotional efforts, with little return on investment. However, creating
and mainting blog is relatively easy after comfort level is achieved and the results are
far-reaching and surprisingly effective. The best way for the company to attract its
potential customers is interacting and giving them opportunity to talk about their needs.
This is what Starbucks offers at “My Starbucks Idea”, the corporate blog that, far from
the most usual concept of “corporate”, gives to their visitors the chance to submit ideas
for new drinks, food items, packages, even store designs. Since its launched, more than
100,000 ideas have been submitted by the visitors. People participating at the blog also
will be able to vote for ideas submitted by others, in which ideas received highest votes
will be developed by Starbucks. The same concept can be implemented by Malaysian
Car brands, where the audience should be given a chance in co-creation and product
development process, not only they will feel belong to the brands, their ideas might be
more innovative and better meets the real customer demand.

Another conclusion can be made is that most of the company is moderately active in
Facebook. It can be seen on the regularity of the content update, in which all the
company did not update their Facebook content daily. The company needs to update
the post frequently, in average 1 to 2 posts daily in Facebook to reach optimum number
of engagement (SocialBakers, 2011; BufferSocial, 2015). This finding may be one of
the factors that contribute to the low level of customer engagement in their Facebook.

5.2 Performance of Facebook campaign

One of the main objectives of social media engagement is to provide better customer
service to the customers. A major challenge for social media marketing is to develop
appropriate response strategies to negative word of mouth (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010;
Roehm and Tybout, 2006) and respond to customer’s request or complaint satisfactorily
and at timely manner, otherwise, they may have negative impacts on online reputation
(Pekka, 2010), a firm’s brand image and sales (Corstjens and Umblijs, 2012). Online
reputation is ‘a complex interplay between company’s communication and actions, on
one hand, and the communication and actions of other stakeholders, on the other hand
(Calin Gurau, 2013), and it is determined by other people's responses to those messages
(Bunting and Lipski, 2000). The result of this study shows that most of the customer
service of the company play efficient role to avoid customer’s frustration. The efficient
performance of the customer service proved that the company consistently monitoring
their social media, listen and act accordingly on what their customers says about their
company, product and services.

Car is a hedonic product due to its style, fun and exciting characters. Hedonic products
may have an effect on customer’s brand loyalty (Sloot et al, 2005; Kuika and
Laukkanen, 2012) as customers seek out pleasurable products and experiences
(Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982). It is therefore fair to assume that hedonic brands
should enjoy more customer attention, passion and interaction. However, in the case of
Malaysia, only BMW and Mercedez are succeeded in Facebook campaign whereas
others failed to attract sufficient customer involvement and engagement. Conclusion
could not be made for their failure, as we did not analyzed the content of their Facebook,
but, assumption that we can suggest are the lacking of their content quality and
irrelevant to their audience interest. According to Kunal et al. (2013), choice of the
marketing strategy and consistency in communal norms does impact social media
effectivess. In social media marketing, content is a core in any success of social media

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campaign and always connected with two strategies; type of message and how the
message is delivered (features of the message). Content contains persuasive messages
such as entertaining, fun, interactive are effective strategy to attract customer
engagement (Yu-Ting et al, 2015; Lisette et al. 2012; Christy and Trcay, 2015).
Establishing a social media campaign is more than just posting an update informing
people that a new product or service is on sale. Rust et al., (2010) discuss that marketing
approach has changed. Firms must realize the important of the customer relationship
driven content rather than transactional old-fashioned marketing concept by controlling
the customer. It used to be about persuading consumers to buy products by
“bombarding” customers with numerous advertisements. Ironically, some of today’s
social media marketing campaigns are still driven by the old-fashioned marketing and
focus on short-term effect (sales), which is also known as incentive–induced behavior
(Dumenco, 2011). Firm must avoid to use social media to simply advertise their
products or services. They have to use social media to drive long-term relationship and
get them involve in creativity and crowd intelligence activities such as invite customer
to co-create, sharing customer experience, tapping customer creativity, giving
feedback, quiz and so on. Therefore, we assume that their content strategy is focusing
on selling and advertising orientation that made customer bored and dissapear.
Furthermore, lack of creativity, excitement, inspiration or persuasive characters that
enable their fan to engage and remains loyal. Future research is recommended to
confirm this assumption.

6.0 Limitation

This study was relied on a month data (July, 2015), and some company may not fully
active in Facebook due to festive season in Malaysia. Repeating the study in longer
period is encouraged to generate more precise results.

7.0 Acknowledgement

This study was supported by UTM and MOHE by using grant no. 00M34

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