The Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing, Managing Brands in Social Media - Literature review Example

Literature Review Introduction This chapter will review the pertinent literature to provide background to the research questions of this study, to clarify the underlying theoretical and practical concepts of social media marketing and brand management. Therefore, this review follows several separate but closely related lines of inquiry: First, the study investigates how social media marketing fits into established marketing theory. Second, literature related to the management of branding in the social media context is reviewed. And finally, a review of studies addressing the use and effectiveness of social media in marketing and brand management is presented. Social Media Marketing in Marketing Theory Much of the theoretical background of social media marketing focuses on the impact of the technology on users’ processing of information and on patterns of communication and interaction. One concept that seems to be centrally-important to using social media and Internet technology in general as marketing tools is Central Capacity Theory, which acknowledges that humans are able to divide attention to a number of simultaneous tasks, but with limitations (Eysenck & Keane, 1995 in Hong, Thong & Tam, 2004, p. 65). The obvious implication of central capacity theory is that the more information that is presented to a user, the more attention will be divided amongst the various bits of information, which reduces the user’s interaction with each of them, and his recall of them later. Several studies provide evidence to support the limitations on attention and recall suggested by central capacity theory. Studies of users’ interactions with online advertising indicate that users are likely not fully-aware of the extent of their exposure to advertising, and in many cases actively avoid it. A study done in 2002 using eye-tracking technology compared what Internet users actively viewed to what they recalled later, and found that most users avoided viewing various forms of advertisements – banner ads, sidebar ads, and pop-up advertisements – and that most of their recall of the advertising content was on a sub-conscious level (Drèze & Hussherr, 2003, p. 19). A similar study seeking to measure the effectiveness of online advertising in terms of users’ “clicking” on the ads found that the frequency of users’ responses was very low – about one ‘click’ per 20 exposures to a particular ad, occurring once in about eight online sessions (Chatterjee, Hoffman & Novak, 2003, p. 531). The researchers’ specific conclusions were that, “Within a session, we found a negative and nonlinear effect on click probability due to wearout, and that earlier ads had a higher probability of being clicked on than ads exposed later. Across sessions, we found that longer intersession times in prior sessions, more banner exposures in prior sessions, and more time since the last click in prior sessions led to higher click probabilities in the current session. We also found that click probability declined as the total number of sessions increased.” (Chatterjee, et al., 2003, p. 535) In other words, the old adage “familiarity breeds contempt” may be applicable; the longer a user is exposed to advertising, the less likely he is to respond to or otherwise positively interact with it. A different perspective on the ability of online marketing to attract and hold users’ attention is taken by Coyle and Thorson (2001), who measure “telepresence” in websites as a function of “vividness” and “interactivity” presented to the user (Coyle & Thorson, 2001, pp. 67-68). The study is a test of a marketing model developed by Rodgers and Thorson (2000), which states that the success of a marketing presentation depends on its being offered to the user at the right moment where user attention, the user’s mood, and memory are optimal. In what may be a negative indicator for social media marketing, the study found that the use of colour, animation, and sound – the “vividness” aspect of a website – is recalled by users more often than a website’s lack of those things is recalled, but that interactivity did not appear to improve users’ recall, or lead to their having more positive impressions of a website (Coyle & Thorson, 2001, pp. 72-75). Other studies with similar results include those of Zhang (2000, pp. 1, 20-23), Liu and Shrum (2002), and Huhmann (2003), who all found that higher visual complexity in websites and online advertisements are usually recalled more frequently by users, but that the limited information processing capacity of users – as central capacity theory states – leads to users being overwhelmed by “too much information” above moderate levels of visual complexity. Huhmann also points out that most users visit websites with different intentions than viewing advertising or engaging with marketing communications, which presents further obstacles to gaining users’ attention (Liu & Shrum, 2002, p. 59; Huhmann, 2003, pp. 14-15; Hong, et al., 2004, pp. 75-76). There are, however, studies which have results that contradict these findings, and indicate that social media marketing may have some advantages. A 2005 study by Moorthy and Hawkins concluded that, “Subjects in our study seemed to like an ad more after repeated exposure to it, and seemed to transfer this liking to the product being advertised, raising its quality rating. Our results are also consistent with “mere exposure” effects: increased ad exposure increasing familiarity with the brand and, hence, perceived quality.” (Moorthy & Hawkins, 2005, p. 358) This study was particularly relevant to the present research, because it specifically addressed marketing on Facebook, and what the researchers were trying to determine was whether users’ positive responses to advertising were a function of frequency of exposure, or the underlying credibility of the brand, product, or service (Moorthy & Hawkins, 2005, pp. 355-356). Credibility in social media marketing can be quantified in a way in terms of “likes” or “shares” by users on Facebook (and “followers” and “retweets” on Twitter), but Moorthy and Hawkins find that users’ perceptions of credibility are not particularly increased by knowing these measures, but rather being exposed to the advertising itself: “Subjects respond more to advertising repetition ––in the sense of changing their perceived quality judgments––when they are actually exposed to advertising than when the advertising frequency data are provided to them as an abstract number.” (Moorthy & Hawkins, 2005, p. 359) A similar conclusion was also reached by a study of marketing on Ebay, where certified sellers and those who pay for additional advertising can increase their exposure by having their products featured in ads throughout the website; generally, these products outperform those that are not ‘featured’ in terms of price and how quickly they are sold (Canals-Cerdá, 2006, pp. 27, 34). Thus it appears that there is contradictory evidence whether mere presence, the quality of the presence, or the underlying credibility of the presence of online marketing communications is the most important factor in successfully reaching and engaging social media users. In that case, it may be helpful to examine some research on how users relate to the technology, and what impact that has on their engagement with marketing communications. Consumer Engagement with Technology There are a number of theories which seek to explain aspects of consumers’ relationships with different communications technologies, such as Adaptive Structuration Theory, which describes the ways in which a communications technology and its users mutually adapt to one another, even extending into wider social realms to develop entirely new ways for people to communicate with one another – a concept that very accurately describes the way in which social media is transforming modern society (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994; Pavlou & Stewart, 2000). The Technology Acceptance Model of Davis (1989) describes how users of a new technology base their decisions to use it on its perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use; a related theory from the field of psychology, Flow Theory, can be used with the Technology Acceptance Model to describe how users consciously engage with and control their online environment (Koufaris, 2002, pp. 207, 218-220). This framework is an extension of the concept of consumer involvement, in which positive or negative impressions of consumers when exposed to advertising of brands or products can be measured in some quantitative way (Zaichowsky, 1985, p. 341); this has obvious application in social media settings, where engagement can be measured by simple metrics such as “likes” and “shares”. An interesting theoretical application in social media marketing is made by Wang, Baker, Wagner, and Wakefield (2007), who explore Social Response Theory in the context of online retail websites. They develop the idea of “website socialness perceptions” as an extension of the idea of “socialness,” that is, the treatment of computers as social actors by people, even though computers obviously do not have human traits (Steuer & Nass 1993 and Reeves & Nass, 1996, in Wang, et al., 2007, p. 143). Through their study, Wang, et al., determined that there was evidence to support the effects of social cues in a retail setting (2007, p. 153), which suggests that marketing in a social setting may also be possible. Clearly, social response theory is not referring to the physical presence of the computer, but rather the content the user experiences with the computer. This conceptualisation of content as a sort of entity has roots in research examining advertising as an object or a product, such as that of Becker and Murphy (1993, pp. 942-943), which looks at advertising as a complementary product as defined by consumer theory, one which affects consumer demand for other products, services, or brands. Viewing brands or products as social entities leads to the concept of the Epistemic Consumption Object, an object that evolves with increasing consumer interaction (Denigri-Knott, Zwick & Schroeder, 2006; Zwick & Dholakia, 2006). These objects can become the focus of a “consumption community”, such as a group of fans of a particular sports team, or in the social media marketing context, “fans” or “followers” of a particular brand; the interaction of the consumers with the ‘object’ can then be quantified in various ways, such as in terms of Consumer Involvement Theory, high- or low-involvement on a rational or emotional basis (Laaksonen, 1994, pp. 20,26, 64-66; Zwick & Dholakia, 2006, 24-26). Interaction and Communication in Social Networks A number of studies examine the nature of relationships and communication in social media. Because it is indeed a form of “media”, two theories – Social Presence Theory and Media Richness Theory – play a significant role in determining the parameters of online relationships. Social presence theory states that media differ in the amount of visual, auditory, and physical interaction they allow amongst communicating parties, while media richness theory describes the amount of information the medium allows to be transmitted in a given time interval; taken together, the two sets of parameters define one’s “social presence” online (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 61). Social Network Theory provides two additional parameters – structure and flow – which determine the nature of online relationships (Borgatti & Foster, 2003). Structure refers to the number of social connections a user has in his or her network, and the position the user occupies within that network, while flow refers to the informational resources used in interactions within the network (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy & Silvestre, 2011, p. 246). It then stands to reason that the strength and complexity of one’s “social presence” has a significant effect on the position one has in a network, and the strength of that user’s network relationships. That framework of social presence and network characteristics leads to an exploration of influence in online relationships. Traditional concepts in communications theory assert that a small minority of users influences others, but in the social media setting, interpersonal relationships among users and the familiarity and willingness to make full use of the social media technology seem to play a greater role in determining influence (Cha, Haddadi, Benevenuto & Gummad, 2010, pp. 1-2). In other words, the more active the user, the more influential he or she will become. This means two important things for social media marketing. First, influential users can be easily identified by their level of activity; because greater activity leads to greater perceived expertise (certainly, in terms of ability to use the social media if nothing else), and lesser perceived bias, the influential user gains source credibility (Brown, Broderick & Lee, 2007, p. 6). And because of the way social media advertising works, with keywords and targeted advertising displayed in user spaces based on the user’s activity, the user’s influence and credibility increases further (Deutsch, 2005, p. 400; McGeveran, 2009, pp. 1107-1108). Second, any particular user – such as a brand being marketed – can actively build influence through mere effort to interact as widely as possible with the network (Cha, et al., 2010, p. 8). Another important implication for brands of the opportunity to build influence and credibility as a social entity is that the social media setting encourages the use of word-of-mouth marketing. User referrals and other endorsements have been demonstrated to be more effective than traditional marketing communications in promoting a brand in social network settings (Trusov, Bucklin & Pauwels, 2009, pp. 97-99). The main reason for this is that word-of-mouth is perceived as being something different than marketing communication, i.e., lacking bias. But, even if the word-of-mouth marketing is being conducted by a brand, it still can have a high degree of credibility if the user-audience has a strong emotional investment in it, something which is evident in the offline world with brands like Harley-Davidson; in other words, if users derive value from the social attachment (Brown, et al., 2007, pp. 4-5). Thus, the social media environment in which the brand can take on a kind of user persona presents great opportunities for building strong audience connections. Managing Brands in Social Media Digital interactive marketing, of which social media marketing can be considered a form, can be described by five distinct paradigms: Interactive Marketing Paradigms How People Use Interactive Technology How Firms Engage to Pursue Marketing Goals Resulting Digital Media Market Thought Tracing Web search for information, entertainment Firms infer consumer intentions from search terms, web viewing histories and serve relevant advertising Market in search terms Activity Tracing Integration of online activity into daily activities (for example, Twitter) Firms exploit information on proximity and pertinence to present marketing message Market in access & identity Property Exchanges Anonymous exchange of goods and services (for example, Ebay) Firms compete with the exchange with their own products Market in service, reputation & reliability Social Exchanges Building online identities and communities (social networks, forums) Firms sponsor or co-opt communities Market in community (based on status, functionality) Cultural Exchanges Cultural production and exchange (for example, memes) Firms offer cultural products or sponsor production Buzz markets Digital Interactive Marketing Paradigms (Source: Deighton & Kornfeld, 2009, p. 5) Based on these definitions, social media marketing clearly falls within the Social Exchange paradigm, but can include aspects of all the others, except perhaps property exchanges. The challenge for firms may be that there has not been a great deal of empirical research done on managing brands in social networks; the business press is full of many opinions on the matter, but rigorous, testable conclusions are comparatively few. Writing in 2001, strategy expert Michael E. Porter suggested that “online” brands are more difficult to build than “traditional” brands, because of the lack of a physical presence and direct human contact (Porter, 2001, p. 8). That might still be a challenge for traditional brands trying to attract new customers who have not yet physically experienced the product, but in the decade since Porter’s observation, opportunities for spreading the brand message have increased enormously. Mintel International Group points out, for example, that online advertising spending increased by more than four times between 2002 and 2009, and that the rapid spread of broadband internet connections has allowed marketers to present far more complex and interactive messages (Mintel, 2010, p. 4). Qualman (2009) asserts that part of the success of social media marketing is the coincidental tapping into the very human desire to brag; with ‘always-on’ connectivity becoming more widespread, a person who has had a satisfying brand experience is more likely to share that with his or her social network, and be more likely to be encouraged to connect with the brand through social media (Qualman, 2009, pp. 72-73). Social media is also becoming seen as a critical part of marketing through the traditional media as well; mainstream media often follow topic trends in the social media as a source of news, and are likely to take note of topics generating considerable “buzz”. The implication for marketers, of course, is that maintaining a high level of activity, as discussed in the previous section, is vital to creating the “buzz” around their brands (Stephen & Galak, 2010, p. 27). That effort can have unintended negative consequences, however. The nature of the social network community implies a sense of ownership in the community. Individual networks, such as Friendster for example, have had rapid life cycles of growth and decline as the community perception of commercialisation grows; the challenge for marketers, then, is to effectively balance controlling the communication to ensure the brand message is spread clearly, and giving up some control of the communication to avoid interfering with the functions of the social network community that make it an attractive marketing arena in the first place (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009, p. 163). To those ends, the literature does suggest a number of general objectives for social media marketing to be successful. First, the organisation should endeavour to provide a networking platform within the larger social network, giving users a space in which to form a group of shared interests, which can be directed towards the brand in unobtrusive ways; for example, allowing users to share and discuss new product ideas (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009, pp. 166-167; Mangold & Faulds, 2009, p. 361). Second, the company must make optimum use of the social network as a communications tool, both to disseminate its message and more importantly, to gather information. For example, many firms are now monitoring social media for complaints about their products and services on social networks like Twitter and some, like the US budget airline JetBlue, are using the same networks to communicate immediately with unhappy customers, even while their customer service problem is ongoing – such as while they’re waiting in the airport terminal for a delayed flight (Cuddeford-Jones, 2009, p. 14). A third initiative social media marketers should pursue is establishing exclusivity, which helps to reinforce the sense of community in the online network, for example, by offering special deals just for members of the online group (Mangold & Faulds, 2009, p. 363). Finally, companies should reconsider their traditional measures of return on investment with respect to social media marketing, and track the social “investment” users make with the companies’ brands – things like numbers of followers, “likes”, and “shares” – since these are better, long-term measures of the marketing communications’ effectiveness (Hoffman & Fodor, 2010, pp. 41-42). This point is echoed by Chief Marketing Officer John Tripodi of Coca-Cola – arguably one of the world’s more successful brands – who recently stated, “Coke takes a long term brand building perspective - if we can get our 40 million fans, or a subset of our fans, talking positively about the brand, that’s a good thing for us. If I can’t precisely measure it using traditional methods, then at this point, so be it. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith.” (Baker, 2012) The Effectiveness of Social Media Marketing The difficulty in measuring social media marketing performance means that, at least until now, quantified judgments on its effectiveness are rare; many experts, such as Coke’s Tripodi, have a sense of its effectiveness, but openly acknowledge that putting it into empirical terms is a bit of a challenge. Therefore, many assessments are anecdotal, drawing inferences from such factors as the amount of spending on social media marketing, the number of users associated with brands’ social media presences, or other broad indicators of online activity. For example, Starbucks in 2009 was said to have more than 1.7 million “fans” of its Facebook page (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009, p. 166); which would indicate an effective social media initiative from the point of view of CMO Tripodi of Coca-Cola and Hoffman and Fodor (2010). Large numbers of users do seem to have a positive impact. On Twitter, for example, researchers have found that a “retweet” – one user forwarding a tweet he or she has viewed to his or her own network of followers – will on average be retweeted again three more times and reach a minimum of about 1,000 users regardless of how many followers the original user has (Kwak, Lee, Park & Moon, 2010, p. 10); other researchers have found the amount of Twitter conversation to be a more accurate predictor of brand performance (such as predicting the success of a new movie release) than more traditional index and forecasting methods (Asur & Huberman, 2010, p. 1). There also seems to be a high degree of trust among users for each others’ judgments on brands; a 2009 study found that about 32% of the world’s 200 million (at that time) active blogs contained information and opinions about brands, which were being read by audience of roughly 71% of the world’s 625 million ‘active’ Internet users (Melville, Sindhwani & Lewis, 2009, p. 1). That equates to about 440 million users, meaning that each of the blogs discussing brands and products is reaching, at a minimum, at least 7 or 8 other potential customers for the brand. Furthermore, about 36% of active Internet users expressed greater trust in companies that maintained blogs, and an only slightly lower percentage, 32%, expressed confidence in the opinions of bloggers about brands and products (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009, p. 166). Maximising interactivity also seems to attract new customers quite effectively. In a campaign connected to its Facebook and Twitter profiles, personal care products manufacturer SCA Libresse launched an interactive clothing design contest, where young women (ages 14-25) could design underclothing on a provided template and share their designs with the community; as a result of the campaign, SCA Libresse saw the number of visitors to its website increase by 74%, and perhaps more importantly, saw a 60% in the amount of time visitors spent on average viewing the company’s website (Fagerstrøm & Ghinea, 2010, p. 68). An assessment of online user engagement for the UK-based games manufacturer Board Games Extras had a number of positive indicators (Q Social Media, 2011): An increase of 500 direct and an estimated 300 indirect visits per month driven by social media to the company’s website; these are tracked by noting the websites where links to the company’s website were accessed by visitors. An overall increase (on a year-to-year basis) of 1,600 visitors per month to the company’s website. A doubling of the number of fans/visitors to the company’s Facebook page, and a similar increase in the number of followers of the company’s Twitter feed. Perhaps most telling, the company during the period of the assessment (June 2010 through June 2011) actually decreased its online advertising spending, although the amount of the decrease is not given. These findings tend to support earlier estimates that up to 43% of social media users in Europe visited companies’ own websites, and about 16% of social media users had sent direct messages to or had a dialogue with brand representatives (Microsoft Digital Advertising, 2007, in Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009, p. 166). A somewhat newer method of quantifying social media marketing effectiveness is presented by social media marketing firm Yomego, which has developed a Social Media Reputation (SMR) metric to provide a relative assessment of performance. The score combines reach (the amount of social media content that names the brand in some way) with satisfaction (the amount of that content which is favourable toward the brand), and adjusts it for recency by comparing the ‘noise’ with the previous three months (Charles, 2012). Two brands well-known in the UK – the fragrance brand Lynx and Canon cameras – are compared. In the case of Lynx, an aggressive social media program, including carefully maintaining a Facebook presence with constant updated content, drove the brand’s SMR score up from 42 to 49 in a four-month period. By contrast, Canon, which should benefit from photos being one of the most-shared media on the Internet, failed to capitalise fully on social media marketing (its most popular Facebook page, for example, is managed by a fan), and saw its SMR score decline from 84 to 79 in a similar four-month period (Charles, 2012). Turning to advertising spending as an indicator of social media marketing effectiveness – or at least, an indicator of the value companies place on social media – spending on targeted advertising on Facebook doubled between 2009 and 2010, driving up advertising prices even though the average click-through-rate decreased; a classic illustration of high demand for a particular commodity (Webtrends, 2011). More recent figures show the trend towards great social media marketing activity is continuing, and perhaps even increasing. In the fourth quarter of 2011, global spending on Facebook advertising accounted for 2.7% of all digital advertising spending, which translated into companies with Facebook presences gaining new users at a rate of about 9%. Search-based advertising still increased as well, but spending on mobile search-based advertising (designed for smartphones and tablets), accelerated between 2010 and 2011 from an annual increase of 2% to between 7% and 8%; this is significant, because mobile devices are specifically designed to interface with social media, particularly Twitter (Efficient Frontier, 2012). And finally, what may be a very good indicator in the value companies are placing on social media is the trend towards firms using social media platforms for their own internal communications. 20% of large corporations are now using social media for enterprise networking in addition to, and in some cases in place of, company intranets (IP Performance, 2012). The implication of this is that as companies become more familiar with using social media for their own, non-marketing purposes, they are more likely to adapt well to social media as a marketing platform. Summary Social media marketing fits into the broad study of marketing in a number of ways. First, theories, such as central capacity theory, that describe the factors that affect and limit users’ attention to and recall of information they are presented set important parameters on the amount and nature of marketing content that can be conveyed in the digital setting (Hong, et al., 2004). Yet there is some contradiction in determining exactly where the limits are set; while some researchers have found that more and richer content is not necessarily an advantage to the marketer (Zhang, 2000; Coyle & Thorson, 2001; Liu & Shrum, 2002; Huhmann, 2003; Chatterjee, et al., 2003; Drèze & Hussherr, 2003), others have found the exact opposite to be the case (Moorthy & Hawkins, 2005; Canals-Cerdá, 2006). This somewhat ambiguous situation suggests that many other factors play a significant role, including individual perspectives on the personal relationship with the technology (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994; Pavlou & Stewart, 2000; Koufaris, 2002; Wang, et al., 2007), and the interaction of the user with the advertising or other marketing communication as an entity (Laaksonen, 1994; Denigri-Knott, et al., 2006; Zwick & Dholakia, 2006). This view of the advertising or a brand as an object permits it to act as a member of a social network, and be able to exert influence and establish credibility as a source of information, which are functions of the strength and extent of network connections and the amount of interaction within the network (Borgatti & Foster, 2003; Brown, et al., 2007; Cha, et al., 2010; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010; Kietzmann, et al., 2011). The literature is less clear, however, on how businesses can successfully utilise social media, which integrates aspects of four of the five paradigms of digital marketing: Thought and Activity tracing, and Social and Cultural exchanges (Deighton & Kornfeld, 2009). Four critical, although somewhat general, objectives for social media marketing are suggested by the literature: Providing social networking platforms for users, such as Facebook pages where ‘fans’ can interact with the company and each other; maximising the use of the social network as a communications tool to both monitor user “buzz” about the brand and to communicate with users quickly; establishing a sense of exclusivity among the connect social network users; and assessing the effectiveness of social media marketing efforts in terms of the actual activity among users, rather than traditional measures of ROI (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009; Mangold & Faulds, 2009; Cuddeford-Jones, 2009; Hoffman & Fodor, 2010; Baker, 2012). Despite the apparent lack of a clear “blueprint” for social media marketing, the impact of it is unmistakable; one “tweet” about a brand or product on Twitter is likely to reach a minimum of 1,000 users, and roughly a third of active Internet users worldwide, share, read, and express confidence in other users’ information about brands, companies, and products (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009; Melville, et al., 2009; Kwak, et al., 2010; Asur & Huberman, 2010). Case studies of specific companies such as SCA Libresse, Board Games Extras, Lynx, and Canon clearly demonstrate that social media marketing activity has measurable positive effects – while overlooking social media tends to be to the brand’s detriment, as in the case of Canon (Fagerstrøm & Ghinea, 2010; Q Social Media, 2011; Charles, 2012). Finally, the increase in social media awareness and subsequent spending on digital marketing among companies worldwide is perhaps a very good indicator of the potential of social media. 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