Doherty, Anne

Megwalu, Anamika

English

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Against the GrainVolume 29 | Issue 6 Article 23December 2017Collecting to the Core-Social Media in Education,Healthcare and MarketingAnamika MegwaluSan Jose State University, anamika.megwalu@sjsu.eduAnne DohertyCHOICE/ACRL, adoherty@ala-choice.orgFollow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atgPart of the Library and Information Science CommonsThis document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact epubs@purdue.edu foradditional information.Recommended CitationMegwalu, Anamika and Doherty, Anne (2017) "Collecting to the Core-Social Media in Education, Healthcare and Marketing," Againstthe Grain: Vol. 29: Iss. 6, Article 23.DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.788745Against the Grain / December 2017 - January 2018 <http://www.against-the-grain.com>   continued on page 46Collecting to the Core — Social Media in Education, Healthcare, and Marketingby Anamika Megwalu  (Senior Assistant Librarian, Dr. Martin Luther King Library, San Jose State University; Computer and Information Technology Subject Editor, Resources for College Libraries: Career Resources)  <anamika.megwalu@sjsu.edu>Column Editor:  Anne Doherty  (Resources for College Libraries Project Editor, CHOICE/ACRL)  <adoherty@ala-choice.org>Column Editor’s Note:  The “Collecting to the Core” column highlights monographic works that are essential to the academic li-brary within a particular discipline, inspired by the Resources for College Libraries bib-liography (online at http://www.rclweb.net). In each essay, subject specialists introduce and explain the classic titles and topics that continue to remain relevant to the undergrad-uate curriculum and library collection.  Dis-ciplinary trends may shift, but some classics never go out of style. — ADSocial media is broadly defined as any website or web-based service that allows users to generate their own content.  The potential of social media via websites and apps has been embraced by many sectors, including education, healthcare, and marketing.  In the education sector, social media plays an import-ant role in providing a collaborative platform for students and instructors.  Students can discuss topics of interest and share information online with peers while educators can have a presence in the digital tools students use.  In the health sector, social media can be used for mass communication and allow health service providers to stay abreast of current innovations, practices, and information.  The marketing industry has adopted social media to promote products, events, and programs to a global customer base, taking advantage of the near-instant ability to reach, connect, and capitalize on social networks.  Although social media platforms and functionality may seem ubiquitous, it is evident that social media is adopted and used for different purposes by dif-ferent sectors, as well as used more frequently in some sectors than others.  As social media evolves into a topic ripe for critical study, library collections should reflect emerging research across platforms, technologies, and sectors.  The following sections present se-lected resources on social media in education, health services, and marketing.EducationEducators may use social media for both professional and instructional purposes.  A 2011 survey conducted by Mike Moran, Jeff Seaman, and Hester Tinti-Kane found that 78% of all faculty use social media for profes-sional career activities.1  They also use social media to complement online and face-to-face instruction.  According to Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory, learning is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context through observation, imitation, and modeling.2 Social media can extend social learning by providing a platform for social interactions beyond the classroom and enhance collabora-tive learning among students.  Depending on the discipline, course objectives, and learning technology, instructors may require that stu-dents read, watch, and review materials from social media sites and encourage students to engage with social media in ways that promote learning.  However, not all social media is used equally.  In education, online videos, blogs, wikis, and podcasts are some of the applications most commonly used by faculty for teaching purposes.  There are a number of books written on the strate-gic integration of social media into classroom instruction.  One, Technology and Digital Media in the Early Years: Tools for Teaching and Learning is a compilation of articles written by various au-thors on the use of digital media for children.3 The book is divided into three parts: the first section focuses on children’s use of digital media;  the second part covers strategic use of learning technologies in classrooms including STEM, simple robotics, and programming;  the third addresses the use of media to strengthen the home-school connection and to develop connected learners and educators.  Authors present educational activities using technologi-cal tools that are grounded in learning theories. This is an important book for early childhood educators, giving them insights into learning theories, media designed for educational purposes, and their effective integration into educational activities. Mainstream social media such as Face-book, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, You-Tube, Twitter, Yelp, and del.icio.us are also used outside the classroom by educational institutions for recruitment, marketing, and communications.  They allow users to post and share comments, videos, and images that are monitored by the institutions’ social media communications teams.  As Rachel Rueben notes, “Online social network users are three times more likely to trust their peers’ opinions over advertising when making decisions.”4 Studies have found that institutions use the two-way communication tools of social media to engage their audience, clarify misconcep-tions, promote genuine feedback, and enable peer-to-peer marketing. HealthcareSocial media is used for a variety of purposes in healthcare sectors.  It is used for professional networking and education, organi-zational promotion, patient care and education, and public health programs.  In “Social Media in Healthcare: Connect, Communicate, Collab-orate,” Christina Beach Thielst emphasizes the need to harness the power of social media in health industries.5  She argues that social media can be used to enhance connection, com-munication, and collaboration between various stakeholders and details the blogs, microblogs, social networking sites, podcasts, wikis, bookmarking sites, photo and video sharing platforms, widgets, and apps that are widely used by patients and healthcare workers.  So-cial media sites designed for health professionals for networking and professional education allow users to listen to experts, talk to colleagues, and discuss issues related to patient care, politics and ethics in health-care, biostatistics, practice management, and career strategies.6  Most of these social media sites are closed to the public and solely avail-able to healthcare professionals. For the purpose of organizational pro-motion, patient education, and public health programs, health care organizations have in-creasingly used social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as well as blogs, to communicate to customers via mainstream social media platforms.  Hospitals, medical centers, and pharmacies use them to simul-taneously communicate with large groups of customers, to conduct surveys, and to promote patient empowerment by offering information and emotional support.7  Discussions on these sites are often between patients, helping them gain knowledge and support from each other. The authors of Participatory Health through Social Media discuss the influence of social media on patients’ confidence in communi-cating with healthcare professionals and in selecting healthcare options.8It is important to note that while studies have repeatedly documented benefits of social media use in health services, there are dispari-ties in information sharing for multiple reasons. In Social Networks and Popular Understand-ing of Science and Health: Sharing Disparities, Brian Southwell talks about inequality in in-formation sharing because of individual-level, community-level, and content-level factors.9  In the health sciences, information-sharing behav-iors include interpersonal talk, forwarding of e-messages, peer referral, overt endorsement, electronic protest and denigration, as well as commentary and cooptation.  Southwell points out that the strength of community ties plays an important role in how people within the community are affected by the messages being shared.  Several studies have revealed the negative effects of social media use on the 46 Against the Grain / December 2017 - January 2018 <http://www.against-the-grain.com>relationship between patients and health-care professionals.  Patients who rely on information gathered from discussions and ratings on social media tend to frequently switch doctors and also tend to bring social media content to physician consultations, leading to increased time spent on sorting and substantiating information.10MarketingThe most commonly used social media platforms in marketing are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest.11  Other less popular media are online forums, social review sites, Slideshare, social bookmark-ing, geo-location, and Snapchat.  Social media contributes to the global exposure of products and services and increased traffic to commercial sites.  They help in developing loyal fans, provide marketplace insights, reduce marketing cost, and help establish business partnerships. One of the most discussed topics in social media marketing is customer engagement as it relates to buyers’ behav-iors.  Felix et al. argue that there are two approaches to social media marketing: defenders and explorers.12  The defender approach uses social media to mainly push contents to customers, the community, and their employees.  The explorer approach is more successful as it uses the interac-tive and collaborative features of social media technology to create and maintain reciprocal relationships with stakeholders. Such marketers engage with customers by answering questions from potential buyers, and responding to positive and negative reviews with sincerity.  In Understanding Digital Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Engaging the Digital Generation, sections titled “What’s in it for Marketers” describe the use of different forms of so-cial media including social bookmarking, social media submission sites, forums and discussion sites, media-sharing sites, reviews and ratings sites, social network-ing sites, blogs, podcasts, microblogs, and wikis.13  Studies have shown that a two-way communication between compa-nies and customers can influence buyers’ decisions positively even when there are negative reviews. Social media features such as instant information sharing, the visibility of in-dividuals’ social networks, and often-un-mediated customer feedback can be used by marketers to influence the consumer’s purchasing decisions.  In Influence Mar-keting: How to Create, Manage, and Mea-sure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing, authors Brown and Fiorella claim that there is a correlation between word-of-mouth advertising and social media communications, which is why it has become a part of the marketing strat-egy for businesses.  They argue, “There’s Collecting to the Corefrom page 45no question social media has introduced some key factors into today’s business world — open dialogue, increased con-sumer awareness, and accountability.”14 These factors affect social scoring via the use of emoticons, comments, sharing, and revisits, adding to the value of influence marketing.  However, the struggle remains in connecting influence measures to sales revenues. Although measuring influence based on transactional data is difficult, there are other data analytics that justify the value of social media in marketing.  Eric Brown discusses social platform analytics such as number of unique visitors, number of page views, time spent on the site, and user demographics.15  He underscores that while marketers depend upon these metrics, tracking this data is complicated due to differences in the analytic func-tions offered by different platforms.  For instance, in the case of tracking unique visitors Facebook only provides numbers on accounts reached, YouTube tracks unique cookies, and Instagram does not collect such data.  Marketers traditionally relied on tracking data through Google Analytics and Omniture for their entire site, but now they also have to rely on data collected by multiple social media apps. The issue lies in developing a systematic method to de-duplicate unique visitors from all the social media apps.  Addition-ally, it is difficult to track a company’s overall reach because social media apps use their own definitions for reach.  Data tracked by independent companies such as comScore, Nielsen, and Quantcast often give different numbers for the same metric due to differences in methodologies. While social media usage is prevalent in the educational, healthcare, and mar-keting sectors, critical scholarship across these sectors is still emerging.  As social media use becomes ubiquitous across personal and professional spheres, it is concerning that the ethical use of social media is a seldom-discussed subject, es-pecially in marketing.  As Peggy Kreshel says, “Ethics is an inherent component of our cultural understanding of what it means to be a professional.  It seems that for a variety of reasons, ethical thinking actively enters into advertising decision making only rarely.”16  Social media enable global connections with consumers and generate enormous amounts of data on personal activities and behaviors.  These data, commonly known as big data, are often tracked and retooled without much transparency, raising questions of privacy, surveillance, and security.  For information professionals, familiarity with social media applications, usage, and user behaviors is important across outreach services, digital literacy initiatives, and library collections. As the selections discussed here illustrate, embracing the potential of social media networks while understanding their vul-nerabilities is critical.  Endnotes1.  Moran, Mike, Jeff Seaman, and Hester Tin-ti-Kane. “Teaching, Learning, and Sharing: How Today’s Higher Education Faculty Use Social Media.” Person Learning Solutions and Babson Survey Re-search Group, 2011. Accessed August 4, 2017.  http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED535130.pdf2.  Bandura, Albert. Social Learning Theory. Mor-ristown, NJ: General Learning Press, 1971.*3.  Donohue, Chip, ed. Technology and Digital Media in the Early Years: Tools for Teaching and Learning. New York: Routledge, 2015.*4.  Reuben, Rachel. “The Use of Social Media in Higher Education for Marketing and Communica-tions: a Guide for Professionals in Higher Education.” (2008). Accessed August 4, 2017. http://rachelreu-ben.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/social-me-dia-in-higher-education.pdf5.  Thielst, Christina Beach. Social Media in Health-care: Connect, Communicate, Collaborate. Chicago, IL: Health Administration Press, 2013.6.  Ventola, C. Lee. “Social Media and Health Care Professionals: Benefits, Risks, and Best Practices.” Pharmacy and Therapeutics 39, no. 7 (July 2014): 491-520. Accessed August 4, 2017. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4103576/7.  Smailhodzic, Edin, Wyanda Hooijsma, Albert Boonstra, and David J. Langley. “Social Media Use in Healthcare: A Systematic Review of Effects on Patients and on their Relationship with Healthcare Professionals.” BMC Health Services Research 16, no. 1 (2016): 442-456. Accessed August 4, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-016-1691-08.  Syed-Abdul, Shabbir, Elia Gabarron, and Annie Y.S. Lau, eds. Participatory Health through Social Media. London: Academic Press, 2016.9.  Southwell, Brian G. Social Networks and Popular Understanding of Science and Health: Sharing Dis-parities. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.*10.  Ibid,  Smailhodzic et al.11.  Stelzner, Michael A. “2016 Social Media Mar-keting Industry Report: How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Business.” Social Media Examiner (2016): 1-56. 12.  Felix, Reto, Philipp A. Rauschnabel, and Chris Hinsch. “Elements of Strategic Social Media Market-ing: A Holistic Framework.” Journal of Business Re-search 70, (January 2017): 118-126. Accessed August 4, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.05.00113.  Ryan, Damian. Understanding Digital Market-ing: Marketing Strategies for Engaging the Digital Generation. Fourth edition. London: Kogan Page, 2017.*14.  Brown, Danny, and Sam Fiorella. Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage, and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media. Indianapolis, IN: Que, 2013.*15.  Brown, Eric. “Tracking Audience Data for Your Content on Social Platforms,” in The New Advertising: Branding, Content, and Consumer Relationships in the Data-driven Social Media Era, ed. Ruth E. Brown, Valeria K. Jones, and Ming Wang. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016. 315.*16.  Kreshel, Peggy J. “Ethical Advertising in Today’s New Advertising Ecosystem,” in The New Advertis-ing: Branding, Content, and Consumer Relationships in the Data-driven Social Media Era, ed. Ruth E. Brown, Valeria K. Jones, and Ming Wang. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016. 354.**Editor’s note: An asterisk (*) denotes a title selected for Resources for College Libraries.

Collecting to the Core-Social Media in Education, Healthcare and Marketing

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