Social Media Networks as a marketing strategy for the enterprise.

A major change from conventional marketing perspective is the shift from persuasion to influence.

Marketers should recognize that engaging social media networks is the best way to communicate with the increasing number of user/consumers who spend considerable part of their time online but marketers should be aware of engaging consumers online has a price of sharing influence. The online consumers are normally hard to reach with traditional push based or mass media based marketing methods (Forrester, 2007). The challenge of social media/ networks is the lack of experience and systematic research on the aptitude and effects of these applications. This means engaging social media/networks as part of a marketing strategy is still a trial-and-error process. The theoretical fundament for working professional with social media/network is limited and herby it is a pioneer job to find ways enterprises and marketers can extract value from social media network. A number of authors have researched in different areas of where social media network has impact on the enterprise business. Swisher (2007) has searched the area of social media on the enterprise media asset management. Craig (2007) has searched the area of social media on learning environments and Anderson (2007) has described the commercial and organizational effect of social media applications. Bernoff and Li (2008) have worked with the different ways enterprise departments can engage social media networks without going into specific applications (Marketing, sales, costumer support, operations). To be able to gather the two approaches it will be good to look at the issues from a dual perspective – from marketing and applications perspective combined. Using the dual perspective we can identify two main ways of engaging the social media networks as part of the company marketing strategy: The Passive and the Active way.

Ways of engaging Social media	Description
The passive way or listening-in.	Using Social media networks as intelligence tool i.e. as source of customer voice and market information
The active way:	Using applications of Social media networks as PR, Direct Marketing and customer influence tool as well as a means for personalizing the customer experience and tapping costumer creativity.

Table 2.5 Using the dual perspective of engaging social media.

The passive way of using social media networks can be recognised as a “top down” (B2C)[1] process where marketers collect intelligence from the consumer from listening to their voices of what they say online about the company, its products and competitors by monitoring the social media networks. This is not something new from a marketing perspective never the less it is important to learn about the experiences the costumers have with the company’s product, brand and services. This way of collecting market information gives the company and its marketers the possibility to minimize the damage by having the opportunity to change/modify the product. Where do the marketers and companies find the voice of the costumers? Online blogs, forums and bulleting boards and even social networks are the places to monitor from a company point of view. What is

most important to know from a company perspective is how valid and credible do the costumers consider these applications. According to Elliott (2002) and Bates et al (2006) research, costumers experiences expressed in forums, blogs and product reviews is considered very credible by other consumers as this UGC[2] become influencer on other consumers attitude to the company and its products can be recognised as “vertical” communication (C2C)[3]. The entire viral exchange of experience and information can be the success or the failure of a products and brands seriously

disrupting costly marketing actions. Doing the listening and collecting of information from costumer’s voice in a professional way can save time and cost in using traditional market research for this purpose.

The active way of using social media networks can be recognised as a “bottom up” (C2B)[4]process where marketers actively engages in a dialog with consumers by launching a corporate blog or discussion forum. What happens in the bottom up process is that marketers do not own the message anymore when the dialog is created with the consumer the persuasion age is over and the new age of influence has started (Douma, 2008). This has been widely used by Steve Jobs CEO of Apple and McDonalds Vice President Bob Langert who both daily post opinions on the corporate blog encourage the consumer to respond and exchange views and opinions. A variant of this strategy is when companies make employees publish content on the corporate blog. In fact content is the new message in social media network channels. According to Eikelmann (Eikelmann et al 2008) the best a company and its marketers can do in this environment is to engage with the consumers through social media network in order to influence the message. This approach requires openness and trust of employee’s capabilities (McAfee, 2006; Bryan et al 2007) and the company’s products and communication – it has to be “pure and clean” when you open up for a dialog. Next to company sponsored blogs a simple low cost way to engage social media as PR is to use a content communities – like a video sharing sites YouTube for distributing advertising material. One thing is for sure companies and their marketers are forced to look for alternative communication strategies to market in the social media environment as advertising literacy and changing consumer behaviour diminish the ROI (Biegel, 2008; Constantinides and Fountain, 2008) These strategies has to be taken into consideration the fragmentation of the market of what will change the rules of targeting into behavioural marketing favour (Meadows-Klue, 2008).