The Importance and Growth of the Social Network in Marketing - Assignment Example

Thinking Piece Week 1 Internet has an interesting history which has made marketing communication quite easy and innovative. The article First map of Australia's twittersphere by ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) highlights the importance and growth of the social network, Twitter. The article may have highlighted the important aspects and the quick growth of Twitter, but along with it also it showed how such social networks or media help people communicate to each other to spread news and thus becomes an efficient and important source of marketing. Before discussing the importance of social media and the article in question, it is very important to understand what social media marketing is Social media marketing may be considered as the method of attracting website traffic by means of social media sites (Powell etal 2011). Social media marketing programs generally are based on efforts to produce content which draws the attention and persuades readers to share it with their social networks. A commercial message may go from user to user and most probably spreads more a head as it seems to be coming from a trust, intermediary, as the company itself is not involved in the process but the people are passing it forward to those they know thus increase the credibility of the message. As the article is based on Associate Professor Axel Bruns and Dr Jean Burgess of CCI and the Queensland University of Technology analyzing topics which Australians think are interesting (ARC 2012). The above mentioned researcher designed a network map in which the showed how different issues connected. The Here one may note that every issue may be discussed on such websites and this makes it an extremely reliable source of marketing. According to Prof Bruns (2012) “It reveals vibrant networks around issues of interest and concern to Australians that interweave across the whole physical continent. ”Thus it may be said that, social media has taken over the responsibility of a word of the mouth successful marketing strategy. Week 2 While designing a successful marketing strategy one has to be careful in selecting the information. In this case scenario one has to filter out that which doesn't help me and one must use his/her information literacy skills to apply the marketing information one really needs. As Thorpe (2003) point out that one must select opportunities with highest potential value and execute such that value is maximized. In this sense when a marketing professional is planning a strategy he/ she must be careful about selecting only that information and opportunities which are the most important ones, only then will the strategy be considered a valuable one. Keeping this in mind it is very important to understand the fact that a marketing professional must be strong at research and has to have sound product and market knowledge, and then only can he/she implement the most valuable information and select the most valuable opportunities to for a successful strategy. If marketing professional has information overload problem he may always apply the worst strategy. Inorder to implement and select the correct information he/she should make sure he/she knows the risk, budget and customer quite well. Even then selecting the correct information regarding these three elements of the strategy is quite important. It may be said that the marketing professional has to be an expert on filtering information , he/she must know exactly what is required for the success of the plan for which one has to filter out that which doesn't help me and one must use his/her information literacy skills to apply the marketing information one really needs. Week 3 Michael Rappa’s (2010) research titled Business Models on the Web, shed light on the importance of material comes from revenue and business models. The nine categories help one to understand the entire scenario. The fact that every model is simple yet easy to understand makes it more important of marketing professionals. The fact that the intent has give way to innovate methods which were previously used for marketing. Rappa’s (2010) categories seem to be extremely old methods of marketing like , Brokerage , Advertising , Infomediary , Merchant, Manufacturer (Direct) , Affiliate, Community, Subscription, Utility . However these methods are now days implanted in new and different ways to attract the consumer. Internet net has helped this method to be more widely used as successful method with a new touch. This is where one may note that Internet marketing all about a prefect and innovative strategy using the traditional methods of marketing. The more innovative the strategy the more the product will be sold regardless of how old the method of marketing is. For example advertising is an extremely old method, but companies still use it and have made it more innovative by using online advertising Thus, the fact that marketing requires a sound business model is quite true. All companies should follow a certain business plan of marketing if they want their product be successful. According to Rappa (2010) “. The business model spells-out how a company makes money by specifying where it is positioned in the value chain.” This chapter is prefect depiction of the before mentioned notion. Week 4 Email marketing has become something quite popular in the field of marketing. This may be due to the fact that The vast proportion of customers are engaging the internet quite frequently nowadays (Fairhead 2003) This is why marketing professionals are increasingly moving to on-line. However, it may also be pointed out that with the new era of texting now people preferred to texted campaigns then receiving marketing information through email. This may be due to the fact that Text-ing is way better than email - it’s to the point and it keeps me on message!” As for email marketing, many people tend discard messages. They read that the message has come from a company, and might choose to discard the message even before thinking of opening it. Another problem with email marketing is that it like mentioned above tends to be too long and descriptive so if people even open it they just delete after reading the first few lines. Due to this now people mark such messages spam, so the message go straight to the to spam filter and people do not even know they received a message. SMS message marketing is simpler and the consumer even receives the message. They messages are shorter and quite concise so the receiver tend to read through it in one go. Another important element of texting is that the receiver gets a notification from the phone that he has received a message, so naturally receiver opens it and reads it (Leppäniemi, 2008). Here the company has atleast made the customer read the message even though he is not interested. Thus, it may be said that SMS text marketing, promotes instant action, and it also makes it hard for receivers to ignore the messages they get. It is certainly a valuable method of marketing for companies to consider the option of SMS marketing for their overall strategy. Week 5 "Idea competitions are to innovations in marketing for the 21st century as focus groups were to innovations in marketing for the 20th century. This means crowdsourcing rules! The before mentioned is quite true as there a lot of reasons as to why for crowdsourcing may be helpful to companies for completing tasks, resolving issues , or to collect information. This may include the aptitude to reduce peak demand, contact low-priced labor and information, produce better results. This may only be the organizational benefit point of view; it even has a lot of marketing benefits of the company, it may even serve as a reliable source for generating high profits It may also be noted that crowdsourcing has always helped the well known companies to gain market research, brand loyalty and creativity in their work (Howe 2009). Marketers have to become aware of the exceptional method as through this they may be able to use open innovation sites, which may work as an extension of the overall brand for them. An extremely simple method to implement this is by utilizing white-label innovation platforms, as they without difficulty allow marketers to manipulate the look and feel of a crowdsourcing idea inorder to develop a strong bond between the brand being marketed and the innovative idea being used. Many well known companies are also implementing this method internally as Innovation can at times stem from the most unpredicted places. A good example of this is a famous consumer-facing Fortune 1,000 which introduced an internal innovation program to aid generating creative ideas inside the company, the most applicable and creative idea was given by an employee of the IT department (Greeley, 2009). So, it may be said that crowdsourcing is an extremely successful method which helps the marketer to know exactly what is in the minds of the consumer. He/she can apply those ideas to the strategy inorder to deign a top class promotional and marketing plan. References ARC (2012); First map of Australia's twittersphere, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) retrieved from http://apo.org.au/commentary/first-map-australias-twittersphere on September 19 2012 Fairhead, N. (2003), “All hail the brave new world of permission marketing via email”. Media 16 Greeley Matthew (2009), Embrace Crowdsourcing Successfully retrieved from http://www.brightidea.com/news-coverage-22.bix on September 19 2012 Howe Jeff (2009), Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Crown Business; unedited edition Thorp John (2003), The Information Paradox. Mcgraw-Hill Leppäniemi, Matti (2008), “Mobile marketing communications in consumer markets”, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Department of Marketing, University of Oulu Powell, Guy R.; Groves, Steven W.; Dimos, Jerry (2011), ROI of Social Media: How to improve the return on your social marketing investment. New York: John Wiley & Sons Rappa Michael (2010), Business Models on the Web retrieved from http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html on September 19 2012 Read More