The Successes of Social Media - Essay Example

Social media is now being considered a very convenient way of marketing since the information reaches the intended consumers quickly, yet the costs involved are minimal.

Interesting developments have taken place in the avenues that companies are choosing to market their products online, with the now new option where people are linked with items according to the information they provide on social media. This classification is done in relation to the personal information they provide when registering for an account with either Facebook or Twitter. However, there are certain ethical and technological issues that need to be considered when choosing this channel of marketing, which are discussed in this paper.

Technological Considerations Scalability of a website puts into consideration the efficiency of the website’s performance both during peak and valley situations. The channel chosen should be in a position to handle the traffic when at its peak. Slow sites are frustrating to customers and are likely to drive them to the competitors’ sites in case their sites are faster and more user-friendly. As the popularity of the channel chosen increases, it needs to scale with minimal efforts so as to reduce the marketers’ infrastructure management costs.

The product catalogue is another important technological consideration. A markers’ product catalogue is the online repository for the items on sale, and the marketer should ensure effective promotion of the items that need to be pushed and should be available to offer the assistance customer with the items they require. Poorly constructed product catalogues can be rigid and uncompromising, especially if the product attributes that a marketer wishes to link with the customer do not match the likes of the customer or do not align with the definitions provided in the e-commerce application.

The application should be flexible enough to enable the change of products and to link different products with customer likes. A search option allows customers to search for the product from the e-commerce application. The search tool should not only take the customer to the product but also guide them to the products they are looking for. To maximize online revenues, a marketer should settle for a search experience that works well for the customers. The application should be accessible to the customers from other search engines such as Google and Yahoo!

When evaluating e-commerce applications, a marketer should consider business controls that support a compelling and personalized search experience (Zarrella, 2010). The agility of the application enables a marketer to keep track of the business requests and respond to individual visitors’ behaviour. IT experts get frustrated when marketers fail to appreciate the difficulties experienced while implementing their requests, especially in consideration of their tight time schedules. However, such a marketer understands exactly what online marketing requires, and should be in apposition to explain what is needed when monitoring the page or database changes.

An application that can monitor a customers’ activity on the application is most appropriate since it enables the marketer to take the required action with reference to the customers’ behaviour. Ethical Considerations The ethical issues that a marketer should put into consideration when sharing personal information that would link customers’ likes with products include accuracy of the information, accessibility, and privacy of the information. Privacy of the information provided in online social networks is threatened by the technological advancement in information technology and the increase in the ability of technology to capture, compute and communicate the information provided, and the value of the information to those who can use it to their advantage.

The information provided is not limited to the type of people who can have access to it and can fall, into the hands of the wrong people, yet those who need the information place a high on it. Information provided could be used against a person, especially by identity thieves and thus this could give wrong leads to the marketer when linking the customer (Information Resources Management Association & Khosrowpour, 2006). Accuracy of the information provided is essential to an online marketer. Most of the accounts and images shared online are from anonymous sources that cannot be linked to the actual originator of the information.

Such information could be misleading to the marketer who intends to use the information provided by the account holders to link their likes with products matching their likes. Verifying such information is essential to the marketer to avoid being misled (Parrish, 2010). Access to information means information literacy, where access to education helps the society to acquire and develop essential intellectual skills to understand and analyse the information provided online. Access to technological tools where information is stored, and processing the same information is an essential element of access in online marketing.

The customers should be equipped with the knowledge and skills required to search the application from which a marker has linked the individual with a product. Although online marketing has numerous advantages, compared to the normal marketing channels, it is faced with various challenges which a marketer needs to scale out if revenues have to be realized. The above-discussed issues affecting social media marketing, classified into technological and ethical issues would help a marketer to realize increased revenues.