Business and Social approaches to Social media - Essay Example

(Bradley, and McDonald, 2011, pg. 203) The social media has had tremendous influence on the social lives of people as well as on how businesses are marketed. On this case study, I look at the implications of social media on the society and using some companies as case studies, I explore the ways in which businesses can successfully market themselves via social media. Implications of Social Media on Society More than a few students have been kicked out of school for collaborating on Twitter, hi5, Facebook, MySpace, and the like on assigned individual projects.

It is no longer news that some individuals have missed out on employment opportunities due to inappropriate content or associations on their Linkedln or Facebook pages. Some teachers have also been requested to step down due to overtly sexual content within their social networks. (Qualman, 2010, pg. 38) However, it is not all bad as sometimes, social media can help in bringing families a little closer by enabling parents to unobtrusively follow their kids’ lives. Most times in today’s busy life, parents and teenagers share time only around the dinner table, and then everyone goes about his or her own life.

(Qualman, 2010, pg. . dies, Justin Esch and Dave Lefkow, who over a few beers jokingly posed the question – “Would it not be great if there was a powder that made everything taste like bacon?” (Qualman, 2010, pg. 29) The beginning of their success was when Dave started MySpace profile dedicated to Bacon Salt. They then used data openly available on MySpace to seek out people who had mentioned bacon in their profiles and found over 35,000 such people. They began reaching out to such people to gauge their interest in Bacon Salt, and not only did they find interest, they started receiving orders even before they had a product yet.

(Qualman, 2010, pg. 29) World of mouth took over from there, and as Dave describes it “It was one person telling another person, telling another person. It was amazing and scary at the time; we were not prepared for the onslaught.” The viral aspect of this experience branched into non-social media channels, and they even received a free endorsement from the Gotham Girls Roller Derby team. It is one thing to get buzz about one’s product but it is a completely different thing to sell it – and sell it they did.

The spice that made everything taste like bacon incredibly sold 600,000 bottles in only six months. “We did not even have a product at the beginning; instead, we bought cheap spice bottles, printed out Bacon Salt logos and Scotch taped them onto the bottles”. (Qualman, 2010, pg. 29) The Bacon Salt product and brand was formed entirely using social media. Similar to JetBlue, Zappos, and Comcast, the founders of Bacon Salt started following what people were saying about their product and responding to them.

They did other activities, but as Dave and Justin readily admitted, they wanted to keep some of their social media insights to themselves and