The Effect of Social Media on Organization Branding
Jianmo Zhang
University of Southern California
Media has been the main channel through which marketers convey their brand messages and promote their products since 18th century. The traditional marketing model, which is the combination of companies, advertising agencies, and media, has worked well ever since. However, with the rise of Internet, the key role in branding played by conventional media, which comprises print media and broadcast media, has been increasingly challenged (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009). Marketing budgets has been greatly shifted to online channels (Jennings, 2007).
Notwithstanding it simplified the process of marketing to some extend, online channel is never easy to manage. Instead, it includes multiple formats of communication aiming at variety of target customers, such as banner ads appearing on web sites, personalized e-mails sent by organization marketers and so forth (Palmer& Koenig-Lewis, 2009). Consistent with this media revolution, in recent years, social media, which further decrease the cost of communication for companies tremendously, has become a major hit in marketing and media field (Palmer & Koenig-Lewis, 2009).
In existing research, Social media is defined as: "online applications, platforms and media which aim to facilitate interactions, collaborations and the sharing of content" (Universal Maccann International, 2008, p. 10). It has become the representative of
Social media is tool that combines the term social, which refers to the interactions that people have with each other when sharing and receiving information, and the term media, which refers to the instrument of communication. About 12 years ago was when Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace began started this reign of the social media taking over everyone’s lives. It connects us with the other parts of the world. Throughout this generation and the past ones, many have questioned if social media is the best thing around or if it’s doing bad to us. There are always two sides to everything, one always being the correct one, yet with this topic there isn’t, it just depends perspective on how you perceive it.
Currently, the business world is rapidly changing due to technology advancement. Every company needs to catch up to the latest trends to be able to survive in the industry (Olsen, 2005). Turning into the digital age, online marketing like social media are now being used in most organizations. It is a good opportunity for companies to apply digital marketing to their marketing activities since it is much cheaper and affordable than the traditional marketing methods. Moreover, online media will enable marketing team to get customers’ feedback about their products and services in real time and improve what negatively affects their company (Irwin, 2011).
The marketing channel has multiplied during the past few years due to digital boom. The advent of social media has ushered in a new age of marketing. In fact, the use of social media in business is no longer considered cutting edge—it's standard. (The New Age of Marketing, 2017). However, this does not necessarily mean that the traditional channels of marketing have become redundant.
Marketing is continuously changing and growing within the business field. Recently, social media is becoming one of the main marketing strategies used by companies, which is known as social media marketing. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and blogs are some of the platforms used in this area of marketing. These types of social media allow consumers to be updated by following their favorite companies. It is not a surprise companies are starting to regularly use this form of marketing due to the role social media has in today's society. Social media does, however, impact a company in a multitude of ways. There is much debate on whether companies should or should not use social media to market themselves. Even though there are some flaws
In today’s era of technology we are living in a brand saturated world, for a brand to stand out and be successful. A Brand is defined as what people feel about the company, the products and service. The world’s new technologies for businesses have distinctly simplified the relationship between brands and their customers. According to theorists the suggested that the benefits of digital branding include increased development competence, reduced density and costs as well as enhanced statistics integration and innovation for businesses to be successful ( Chaffey, 2009) This is exemplified by so many successful brands such as Apple, Samsung etc., which facilitates their business to adapt to online/digital branding in order to achieve
"Social media are online media where users submit comments, photos, and videos- often accompanied by a feedback process to identify "popular" topics." (Kerin & Hartley, 2016, p. 540) "The ease and speed with which social media enables individuals to create and distribute content make it one of the most powerful mediums of our time." (Agresta, Bough, & Miletsky, 2010) Marketing managers understand that social media marketing strategies both similar to and different from traditional media marketing strategies in more ways than one. To begin with, they both can be created with the purpose of reaching specific amounts and groups of people. One of the more obvious differences is the expense of each and
According to David Edelman in his Harvard Business Review of 2010, the internet has evolved the ways in which consumers engage with brands. This has made the common consumer very promiscuous with their brand relationships. The advantages offered by the new digital age allows the consumers to remain constantly engaged as well as to publicly promote their bought up products, all of this greatly contributes in the development of the brand itself.
Social media is defined as “websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.” However a more accurate definition of social media is as follows: “the relationships that exist between network of people” (Wiang, 3). Although social media traces back to before the 1800s, it is something that has become especially popular over the last two decades. What is interesting about this is that technology began going through a sense of both change and advancement of after
The authors’ first task in their research was to come up with a mutually agreed-upon and easy to understand definition of social media. For a starting or “base” definition, the authors cite the Federal Web Managers Council (FWMC), a group of federal government specialists assigned to develop best practices for federal agency Web sites and general online presence. Many information technology (IT) arms of various federal agencies have adopted and
Traditional marketing made on prints and broadcast media had encountered so much challenges in the recent years. With newspaper prints are closing and television channels having ordeals from profits going down. A significant reason for this is because of the huge numbers of businesses and companies investing their budgets on online channels aside from the usual ones. A research by Forrester Jennings (2007) showed that the consumer’s attention is now shifting to online channels as 56 percent of people who are regularly online at home. And
Social media can be defined as websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or participate in social networking. As a phenomenon of only the past couple of decades, it has certainly changed the way we live our everyday lives. Whether socially or professionally, it opens the door to incredible amounts of information; most of which is freely shared.
Social media is used to define the online means of communication, collaboration, share, and cultivation between interdependent platforms (Tuten and Solomon, 2014) and social media marketing is the use of social media to induce consumers to buy or support a brand, company, website, etc (Barker et al., 2013). Today’s advertisements are much more interactive and specially designed for a targeted customer because social media provides this facility. Also, it helps companies to track customer’s age, gender, habits in a way to adapt their products and reach them more easily.
Every day, marketing professional come up with new ways in which they can market their products to consumers successfully. Marketing of products has significantly changed following the invention of the internet. The enormous popularity of the internet in the past decade has opened doors for marketers in a manner that one could not have imagined twenty years ago. Marketers utilize the internet for the purpose of advertising products in a great way than other media outlets such as television, magazines, newspapers, and radio. Online social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn have become a new big thing in which marketers advertise their product on the internet. More than 67% of the global community have joined one or more social media platforms making them the most successful ways marketers can advertise their products[7]. Online direct marketing is also another way marketers create awareness to the consumers regarding their new or existing products and services. Banner advertisement on the internet is another method of online advertisement. It allows consumers to obtain information on issues they want by clicking the banners of their choice [7]. Contrary to the traditional methods of advertising, online advertising allows consumers to interact with the marketers. Consumers get clarification of issues they may have regarding the advertisement while the marketers can get immediate feedback from the
The term social media generally refers to communication technologies and interactive platform, such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. A further definition is given by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) who described it as a group of Internet-based applications that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content, and emphasizes that any user of social media can be a content creator and can distribute to a network of users. In a broad term, social media is the social interaction via online information and communication technologies
Throughout the centuries the advances of technology have drastically changed the marketing field. The 21st century was revolutionary for the development of social media. With the expansion of social media, the marketing world needed to successfully reach a new audience. Before the advances in technology, marketers had no interaction with their customers. The marketers would simply throw advertisements in the face of the consumers. This strategy would result in short-term results and give businesses no true way to measure their work. Social media gave marketers an inexpensive way to advertise that interacted with customers and measured the effectiveness of an advertisement. This however meant marketing no longer consisted of a one-sided relationship with customers. Marketers had to sail into the uncharted waters of consumer needs. By interacting, understanding, and communicating with customers, marketers began to see the impact of social media had on marketing.