Integrating social media into the marketing mix : the determinants of success

The aim of this dissertation is to demonstrate how three different companies (Starbucks, Walmart and Hewlett-Packard) are integrating Social Media into their marketing mix. How Social Media is a changing trend and why it is becoming essential for companies to adopt it as a marketing strategy in order to gain competitive advantage. The main Social Media Platforms that will be analysed are; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. The literature review encompasses many different academic researchers’ and allows for the integration of ideas, opinions and insights on the importance of being active in Social Media, Social Media benefits, drawbacks and challenges, the analysis of Social Media data, and how to develop a Social Media strategy by providing guidelines. The conceptual framework is a honeycomb framework of seven building blocks, which is then used to highlight the importance of these different components in each case study. It is used to describe how each company can use different set of tools to position themselves, depending on their overall objectives. The case studies present an overview of each company and describe its main benefits, drawbacks and what each enterprise should adopt as a set of Social Media guidelines. The managerial benefits of discussing these cases will allow to comprehensively evaluate the trade-offs of integrating distinct Social Media tools into a company’s overall marketing mix. In the teaching notes, the main learning objectives, suggested assignment questions and respective answers are presented. Finally, the conclusions, limitations and future research of the study are outlined.O objetivo desta dissertação é demonstrar como três empresas diferentes (Starbucks , Walmart e Hewlett- Packard) estão a integrar as redes sociais no seu Marketing Mix. A introdução da dissertação explica como as redes sociais são uma tendência que está a mudar e que se está a tornar essencial para as empresas adotá-las como uma estratégia de marketing para obter uma vantagem competitiva sobre as suas rivais. As principais plataformas de redes sociais a serem analizadas são: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn e YouTube. Para abordar este tema, vários estudos académicos foram analisados. Obtiveram-se pontos de vista e opiniões diferentes sobre a importância de uma empresa estar ativa nas redes sociais, os benefícios das mesmas, as desvantagens e desafios, a análise de dados das ditas redes , e como desenvolver uma estratégia integrando as redes sociais ao Marketing Mix. A estrutura concetual é constituida por sete blocos que, posteriormente, são utilizados para realçar a importância das diferentes componentes, em cada estudo de caso. Os estudos de caso apresentam uma visão geral de cada empresa e descrevem as suas principais vantagens e desvantagens, assim como as linhas de orientação que cada empresa segue para desenvolver estratégias que englobem as redes sociais. Os benefícios principais de discutir os casos, permitirão a avaliação abrangente de integrar diferentes ferramentas sociais no Marketing Mix de cada empresa. Na seção ‘Notas de Ensino’ são abordados os principais objetivos de aprendizagem dos estudos de caso e questões relevantes. Finalmente, as conclusões, limitações e futuras pesquisas são delineadas

Off-The-Shelf Artificial Intelligence Technologies for Sentiment and Emotion Analysis: A Tutorial on Using IBM Natural Language Processing

Artificial intelligence (AI) rests on the premise that machines can behave in a human-like way and potentially solve complex analytics problems. In recent years, we have seen several off-the-shelf AI technologies that claim to be ready to use. In this paper, we illustrate how one can use one such technology, called IBM Natural Language Understanding (NLU), to solve a data-analytics problem. First, we provide a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to use NLU. Next, we introduce our case study in which we investigated the implications of Starbucks’ pledge to hire refugees. In this context, we used NLU to assign sentiment and emotion scores to social-media posts related to Starbucks made before and after the pledge. We found that consumers’ sentiment towards Starbucks became more positive after the pledge whereas investors’ sentiment became more negative. Interestingly, we found no significant relationship between consumers’ and investors’ sentiments. With help from NLU, we also found that consumers’ sentiments lacked consensus in that their social media posts contained a great deal of mixed emotions. As part of our case study, we found that NLU correctly classified the polarity of sentiments 72.64 percent of the time, an accuracy value much higher than the 49.77 percent that the traditional bag-of-words approach achieved. Besides illustrating how practitioners/researchers can use off-the-shelf AI technologies in practice, we believe the results from our case study provide value to organizations interested in implementing corporate social responsibility policies

Customer empowerment in the digital age

The Internet and advances in digital technologies fundamentally are transforming marketing. Armed with an abundance of information and opportunities, consumers no longer accept the role of passive recipients of marketing communication. This is turning traditional communication approaches upside down and forcing brands to interact with individual customers quickly, openly, and continuously. In the digital age, customer engagement is more important than ever. The Marketing Science Institute, for example, has identified understanding how marketing activities create engagement as one of its top research priorities for 2014–2016. More and more brands are using social-media platforms to connect with their customers by creating engaging content so that consumers can interact (e.g., sharing an interesting and current Tweet) and/or by initiating dialog with them (e.g., responding to a customer comment or complaint). These steps undoubtedly are very important in connecting with customers, but they are not sufficient. Most visionary brands not only interact with customers but also empower them. Consider Lego, which enables its customers to create and vote for new product designs on a “Lego Ideas” platform. The designs that receive considerable votes from other customers (i.e., 10,000 “supports”) are then reviewed formally. Those that pass the review are transformed into products to be sold all over the world. The initiative of Lego not only involves the emotional, cognitive, and behavioral engagement of customers—characteristics of a successful customer engagement initiative—but also shifts the power and control of the company's product development to its customers

Strategic Approach in Social Media Marketing and a Study on Successful Facebook Cases

Development of internet and social media has led to significant changes in marketing. Companies are now making serious efforts to integrate social media into their marketing strategies. In order to be successful in these efforts, marketing experts need to think strategically, integrate social media campaigns into their marketing plans and use the right tools in the right way. They should also evaluate the campaign performance and its effect on business performance. The aim of this study is to define the strategic approach adopted by the companies and to explore how companies structure and measure their campaigns. Within the scope of the study, first literature review is made and then 20 successful Facebook campaigns are selected and analyzed through content analysis. The result of the analysis show that companies studied used megaphone strategy (by informing consumers through pages, ads and videos) and magnet strategy (by creating an environment for interaction through applications, surveys and competitions), but they did not use monitor strategy (following customers interaction with one another). Regarding how the campaigns were structured, it is found that half of them aimed to give new information and 20% were supported in offline platforms. The most preferred tool was the Facebook page, Facebook ads were more popular when compared to Facebook videos and the usage rate for surveys, competitions and applications were low. It is also found that like rate and participation rate were the two basic criteria companies used to measure the campaign performance but as the data provided by the companies was limited, it was not possible to comment on the general strategic approach they adopted

DESIGN FOR FAST REQUEST FULFILLMENT OR NATURAL INTERACTION? INSIGHTS FROM AN EXPERIMENT WITH A CONVERSATIONAL AGENT

Conversational agents continue to permeate our lives in different forms, such as virtual assistants on mobile devices or chatbots on websites and social media. The interaction with users through natural language offers various aspects for researchers to study as well as application domains for practitioners to explore. In particular their design represents an interesting phenomenon to investigate as humans show social responses to these agents and successful design remains a challenge in practice. Compared to digital human-to-human communication, text-based conversational agents can provide complementary, preset answer options with which users can conveniently and quickly respond in the interaction. However, their use might also decrease the perceived humanness and social presence of the agent as the user does not respond naturally by thinking of and formulating a reply. In this study, we conducted an experiment with N=80 participants in a customer service context to explore the impact of such elements on agent anthropomorphism and user satisfaction. The results show that their use reduces perceived humanness and social presence yet does not significantly increase service satisfaction. On the contrary, our findings indicate that preset answer options might even be detrimental to service satisfaction as they diminish the natural feel of human-CA interaction

What and how do companies benefit from social media?:a review of seven company case studies

Abstract. Social Media (SM) has turned into our daily life in the information society. People are showing an increasing tendency to build and nurture their online social relationship on SM platforms. Organizational SM has become an important research area for both scholars and practitioners who are interested in online technologies. It is worth of studying what the researches have been done related to the SM usage in organizations, and how the organizations have utilized the SMs for own specific purpose. SM used in organization has grown continuously. Business enterprises quickly recognize the value of shared contents. They have been increasingly adopted in the workplace for decision-making, supporting corporate communication, knowledge management, facilitating communication both inside organization and the stakeholders outside organization, increasing the social capital, enhancing the brand value and promoting the marketing practice in organization, both in business to business and business to customers. Many corporations are using blogs, wikis, and social networking sites (SNS) as routine parts of their business operations. The performances of the usage of the SM can be generally classified as internal usage and external usage. All of them have the different purposes and tactics basing on various targeted users. For the thesis work, a literature review was conducted by studying the existing empirical research on the usage of SM in organizations from selected existing scientific articles. The current status of the organizational SM usage has been investigated. Two theories have been chosen which are both the affordances of SM (Visibility, Persistence, Editability, and Association) and the honeycomb functional building blocks of SM (Identity, Conversations, Sharing, Presence, Relationships, Reputation and Groups). Based on them, the case studies in seven companies have been explored, aiming to search some of the four affordances and certain amount of the seven functional blocks in organizational SM activities, and explain how they influences the organizational behaviours. Applying such two theories shows that the organizations may participant the SM platforms efficiently and effectively in various ways. Some good practises of the SM usage have been portrayed. The risks related of using SM platforms have been mentioned as well. The future potential research works related the organizational SM usage has been discussed

Learning through teaching: ATLAS.ti and Social Media

Social Media is no longer a foreign concept in the current business environment. Companies, for the most part, understand the value that an effective Social Media strategy can add. Firstly, this paper reports on the possible use of ATLAS.ti in analysing user interaction on Social Media platforms, in order to generate feedback that may assist companies in developing and maintaining a customer-focused Social Media strategy. Furthermore, this paper will discuss the researcher's decision to apply ATLAS.ti for this specific purpose, as well as the challenges and victories that were faced in introducing a post-graduate student to this tool

Using Social To Go Local: Analyzing How National And Local Companies Use Facebook To Reach Customers

Facebook has developed into an important marketing tool for many different companies. Facebook and other forms of social media allow businesses to generate and encourage two-way interactions with current and potential customers. This study examines the differences between how national and local business pages use Facebook to market and brand themselves and build online fan communities. The author conducted a content analysis of twenty Facebook business pages to ascertain how frequently businesses were posting content, what types of content were being posted, how many comments, likes and shares did the post receive, and were businesses replying to fan comments. The results of this study show that national companies are able to effectively deploy a consistent social media strategy due to their wealth of resources. While local businesses could develop a strong social media strategy that is grounded in their literal place within a community, national companies are currently more adept at negotiating the social media landscape

Customer Services on Facebook: An Investigation into UK Banking Sector

This research aims to present insights into customer services on social media. There is rich literature on traditional customer services, which approach customer services different perspectives including (a) interactions with service providers (as human and remote interactions), (b) service environment and (c) interactions with other customers (for example through word-of-mouth communication). With the emergence of social media platforms, many businesses extended their service provision to include social media. According to industry sources, 80% of companies were planning to use social media for customer service by the end of 2012. Social media customer service is likely to reshape the provision of services between firms and their customers. However, there is very limited empirical research on the effectiveness of social media platforms as a customer services channel. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to address this gap by focusing on the UK banking sector and analysing their use of Facebook to provide customer services