SocialSev

As social media becomes a more mainstream channel for marketing, it’s become obvious that in order to survive, organizations must adapt. Every day, news stories are published about how one company or another is adjusting to this new climate. Standing still is not an option.

Major media outlets like CNN have been criticized for falling behind citizen journalists on Twitter. Coca-Cola’s presence on Facebook was launched not by the company itself, but by a pair of fans. Ready or not, they were inheriting nearly a million Facebook fans and needed to develop a strategy quickly. My own analysis of the social media practices of companies like Ford and Chrysler struck a chord with a larger audience than even I imagined.

While corporate social media strategies grab headlines daily, a subject that is often overlooked is how educators of marketing students are adapting to their ever-changing field. Last week, I was fortunate enough to connect with Yuping Liu, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. I asked her to conduct a brief interview via email. My original intent was to use her responses as part of a larger piece on the subject. But I was so taken by the depth of her answers that I’ve decided to publish the interview in its entirety instead. More information on this young thought leader can be found after the interview.

Social media has blurred the lines between marketing, PR, and customer service. Will this convergence have a long-term impact on the organizational structure of companies?

Similar to the effect open-source community has had on corporate R&D, social media has definitely opened up the boundaries of organizations.  The marketing, PR, and customer service functions of a company are no longer limited to its marketing or PR departments.  Rather, members of the public, such as bloggers, brand advocates, and other consumers are all playing an increasingly important role.  Although these word-of-mouth sources have always been a part of marketing, their impact is amplified many times because of the accessibility and reach of social media.  Take Get Satisfaction for example.  By organizing consumers and companies all in one community, it allows the customer service function to be fulfilled jointly by companies and their customers.

What are some ways that a company looking to expand into new media can seamlessly integrate their existing traditional marketing strategies? What companies are already doing this well?

I am not sure there is a way to “seamlessly” integrate social media into traditional marketing.  There is quite a bit of mentality shift here.  Some companies who are used to traditional marketing & PR actually find it hard to accept the disruptive force and freedom/lack of control created by social media, and as a result, fail to adapt quickly.  Lots of companies that are using the new media well are actually companies who have limited resources to be able to do traditional marketing (e.g., non-profit organizations).  So in a way, their resource constraint became a blessing as it pushed them to grab new opportunities.  Brooklyn Museum is one of my favorite examples of using a combination of various social media to engage audience and market itself.  Its Twitter account (@brooklynmuseum) has over 23,000 followers and is constantly engaging in a dialogue with its “customers”.

Rather than suggesting ways to integrate new media, I would like to point to a major barrier to integration: a fear of losing control.  I have witnessed companies creating fan pages on Facebook, but not allowing anyone to post any comments, or creating a YouTube channel but afraid of publicizing it anywhere official.  A lot of times, it is because top management is afraid of potential legal issues or negative publicity.  This type of mentality will not survive the social media era.  If you don’t do it, someone else will, and it could be so much worse.

We’ve all heard how Dell added $3M in additional sales from traffic generated by Twitter. What are some the pitfalls of adopting a social media strategy based solely on the premise of increasing revenue?

A big issue in social media marketing is the difficulty in pinning down its ROI.  While $3 million extra cash like Dell has realized is a dream for most businesses, most of the time, immediate revenue gain is not possible.  For example, when I complained about a confusing SkyMiles statement through Twitter, Delta Air Lines immediately followed me and emailed me to solve the problem.  Will I necessarily fly more?  Not really.  But will I be more loyal and harder to be lured away by other airlines?  You bet!  So basing social media strategy purely on immediate revenue gain loses sight of two things: (1) revenue gain that may not be realized immediately but rather in the long run; (2) saving the opportunity cost of customers that could have been lost if it weren’t for well-executed social media strategy.

With a low barrier to entry in terms of cost and resources, has social media leveled the playing field for smaller organizations with a limited marketing/advertising budget? What advantages do big corporations still have?

Definitely.  As I mentioned earlier, lack of resources has pushed many smaller organizations toward social media.  Google’s AdWords was attractive to small businesses because it offered them a cost-efficient way to reach their customers.  With social media, it got even better, as many social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr are freely available to organizations small and large.  An example is the story of the Pizza joint in New Orleans who saw increase in business from distributing coupons through Twitter (according to AdAge).

One advantage that big corporations still have is their ability to engage in more sophisticated analytics.  Monitoring and mining the social media world is no easy task, and can be very daunting to smaller organizations, either due to resource constraint or lack of expertise.  This advantage can help big corporations gain more in-depth insight from social media that can lead to long-term competitive advantage rather than mere sales gains.  Credibility is another advantage that big corporations potentially have.  Information from social media is not completely reliable.  Especially with the rise of hoaxes and rumors in social media, users are more likely to trust larger organizations that they know.  For example, when Michael Jackson died, a lot of people were still hesitant to believe the news until they saw major media reporting it.

How has the onset of social media as a viable marketing tool impacted your classroom instruction?

My classroom instruction had already been impacted by social media concepts even before the social media movement really took place.  I have been using Blackboard in my class for many years, which offers capabilities for the students and I to engage in discussion and collaboration inside and outside of the classroom.  But the onset of social media has definitely brought me even closer to my students and broadened up the scope of classroom instructions.  Via connections through Facebook and Twitter, the distance between teachers and their students has become shorter.  Social media has also become an important part of classroom discussions.  For my Internet marketing class last fall, for example, one of the classes took place virtually in the 3D social world of Second Life, where my students had an opportunity to experience different aspects of the virtual world.  When we got to PA Consulting’s land in Second Life, we ran into the person who helped develop the space and were able to have a very productive conversation about the company’s involvement in Second Life.  This type of interaction would not have been possible without social media shortening the distance between people.

Although I have not used this myself yet, I have heard of other professors using Twitter creatively to enhance classroom interaction, such as this recent Washington Post article describes.  The article also touches upon a real concern among college faculty, which is the validity and credibility of information from social media.  Many professors still do not like to see the Internet (and especially social media) as the students’ only source of information when completing an assignment and insist on the triangulation of information with other more traditional sources such as books and established news media.  In a way, this reaction is understandable, given the numerous celebrity death news on Twitter that has turned out to be wrong.  So overall, I would say that educators are gradually incorporating social media in their instruction while remaining somewhat cautious about it.

In an era when incoming college freshmen have spent the majority of their teen years with social networking accounts, what have you learned from your students? Are we only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of possibilities and creative uses?

For one thing, I got onto Facebook because of my students.  I remember a few years ago, I heard my students talk about how often they check Facebook everyday.  Being a geek myself, that really piqued my interest.  So I decided to check it out myself.  It has become one of the main social networking tools that I have used since then.  Ironically, what my new generation of college students has taught me is that there is no rule in social media and things rarely stay popular forever.  For example, when Facebook became mainstream, my students were already turned off by the fact that their parents and grandparents were now using the website.  Some of my graduate students who were first adopters of Facebook are now using it only to keep in touch with people they used to know (and connect in Facebook with) in college.  Their enthusiasm has not been nearly as high as what I witnessed a few years ago.

I think the challenge of social media is to keep it interesting.  The quick coming and going of information through social media has shortened the attention span of the younger generation.  So to impress them, one has to be ultra creative.  But even that, do not expect one thing to be hot for very long.  Unlike milking a successful advertising campaign for an extended period of time in the traditional marketing world, a company has to constantly re-innovate itself to keep the attention of the new generation in the social media world.  Another lesson is that if your target market is the younger generation, you should try to keep the mainstream at bay.  Sometimes the lure of the mass market can be too lucrative to ignore, but the sacrifice is the loss of the younger audience.

What fundamental principles of marketing remain unchanged, regardless of the medium?

I would say three basic principles of marketing have not changed: (1) A superior product that provides unique value to customers is still the key to sustained marketing success.  A clever marketing ploy may be able to make a product or service temporarily popular.  But if the product/service itself is not superior to others, people will eventually leave when the hype is over.  (2) Building relationships with customers is important to long-term success.  Relationship marketing has long been the norm in B2B marketing.  In the B2C area, the marketing discipline has also been advocating relationship marketing for the last decade.  This is the result of today’s hyper-competitive marketplace.  Social media have made relationship marketing more feasible as they have shortened the distance between companies and their customers.  But the basic principles of good customer relationships apply both inside and outside of social media. (3) Be where your customers are.  The appropriate place to be, whether it is social media or not, will depend on a company’s target audience.  This not only means that a company should act fast to be with its customers but also means that it should not try to jump onto the wagon simply because something is hot at the moment.  For example, I can never understand why some companies would establish a Facebook page.  The nature of their business and their brand image do not go with that social network at all.  Not only do such poorly targeted efforts dilute the company’s resources and brand image, but they make the company look bad when their “fan” page does not have any fans.

Yuping Liu, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Marketing and E. V. Williams Faculty Fellow in the College of Business and Public Administration at Old Dominion University.  She received her MBA and Ph.D. in Management (Marketing Concentration) from Rutgers University in 2002.  Dr. Liu’s research focuses on the intersection among marketing, technology, and consumer psychology.  Her main research areas include Internet marketing, loyalty programs, and customer relationship management.  Dr. Liu’s publications have appeared in Journal of Marketing, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Advertising Research, and Business Horizons, among others. Her blog can be found at http://www.yupingliu.com/wordpress/.