Two hearts in three-quarter time: How to waltz the social media/viral marketing dance
TL;DR: In this article, the authors define viral marketing as electronic word-of-mouth whereby some form of marketing message related to a company, brand, or product is transmitted in an exponentially growing way, often through the use of social media applications.
About: This article is published in Business Horizons.The article was published on 2011-05-01. It has received 414 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Viral marketing & Digital marketing.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic, the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies underpinning its dynamics.
Abstract: Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic—the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—underpinning its dynamics. This logic will be considered in light of what has been identified as mass media logic, which has helped spread the media's powerful discourse outside its institutional boundaries. Theorizing social media logic, we identify four grounding principles—programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication—and argue that these principles become increasingly entangled with mass media logic. The logic of social media, rooted in these grounding principles and strategies, is gradually invading all areas of public life. Besides print news and broadcasting, it also affects law and order, social activism, politics, and so forth. Therefore, its sustaining logic and widespread dissemination deserve to be scrutinized in detail in order to better understand its impact in various domains. Concentrating on the tactics and strategies at work in social media logic, we reassess the constellation of power relationships in which social practices unfold, raising questions such as: How does social media logic modify or enhance existing mass media logic? And how is this new media logic exported beyond the boundaries of (social or mass) media proper? The underlying principles, tactics, and strategies may be relatively simple to identify, but it is much harder to map the complex connections between platforms that distribute this logic: users that employ them, technologies that drive them, economic structures that scaffold them, and institutional bodies that incorporate them.
841 citations
TL;DR: The convergence of social media and CRM creates pitfalls and opportunities, which are explored in this article, where the authors discuss how social media engagement affects the house's core areas (i.e., acquisition, retention, and termination) and supporting business areas (e.g., people, IT, performance evaluation, metrics and overall marketing strategy).
638 citations
Cites background from "Two hearts in three-quarter time: H..."
...By reading customer reviews and blogs, brand managers gain insights into how customers are using their products and how they think about them that could produce more effective CRM contact points (Kaplan and Haenlein 2011a)....
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...Under certain conditions, a company might even encourage this type of behavior, in the hope that its message becomes “viral” (Kaplan and Haenlein 2011b)....
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TL;DR: This study analyzes the influencing factors in terms of characteristics of the content communicated by the company over the level of online customer engagement measured by number of likes, comments and shares, and interaction duration for the domain of a Facebook brand page to show that there is a different effect of the analyzed factors over individual engagement measures.
Abstract: Social networks have become an additional marketing channel that could be integrated with the traditional ones as a part of the marketing mix. The change in the dynamics of the marketing interchange between companies and consumers as introduced by social networks has placed a focus on the non-transactional customer behavior. In this new marketing era, the terms engagement and participation became the central non-transactional constructs, used to describe the nature of participants’ specific interactions and/or interactive experiences. These changes imposed challenges to the traditional one-way marketing, resulting in companies experimenting with many different approaches, thus shaping a successful social media approach based on the trial-and-error experiences. To provide insights to practitioners willing to utilize social networks for marketing purposes, our study analyzes the influencing factors in terms of characteristics of the content communicated by the company, such as media type, content type, posting day and time, over the level of online customer engagement measured by number of likes, comments and shares, and interaction duration for the domain of a Facebook brand page. Our results show that there is a different effect of the analyzed factors over individual engagement measures. We discuss the implications of our findings for social media marketing.
585 citations
Cites background from "Two hearts in three-quarter time: H..."
...In addition, challenges of SMM were investigated, such as aggressive advertisement, lack of e-commerce abilities, and invasion of user privacy (Bolotaeva and Cata 2010; Harris and Rae 2009; Kaplan and Haenlein 2011)....
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...This form of message propagation is often referred to as viral marketing (Kaplan and Haenlein 2011)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide an overview of online distance learning and propose corresponding frameworks for driving intrinsic student motivation and for choosing a successful online teacher, and discuss in detail the optimal target group in terms of participating students and teaching professors.
534 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors define what mobile social media is, what it is not, and how it differs from other types of mobile marketing applications, and discuss how firms can make use of Mobile Social Media for marketing research, communication, sales promotions/discounts, and relationship development/loyalty programs.
384 citations
Cites background from "Two hearts in three-quarter time: H..."
...The Holy Grail of mobile social media usage is, therefore, to initiate the creation of user-generated content in order to ignite truly powerful viral marketing campaigns (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011b)....
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...This is true for social media in general (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010), as well as specific applications like virtual social worlds (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2009) and micro-blogs (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011a)....
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...Social media have, for example, been shown to be particularly powerful in generating viral marketing phenomena (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011b) and supporting new product launches (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2012)....
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...If your company does something truly extraordinary, chances are that the Foursquare community will talk about it and probably transform a simple company message into a viral marketing phenomenon (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2011b)....
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References
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TL;DR: A classification of Social Media is provided which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds.
13,932 citations
"Two hearts in three-quarter time: H..." refers background in this paper
...One of the key rules of social media usage is honesty: deception of the social media community is strongly frowned upon, and often met with anger (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010)....
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...That’s another rule of social media usage Sony Entertainment and Zipatoni did not obey: be unprofessional (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010)....
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...Nevertheless, these numbers illustrate the incredible speed with which so-called ‘viral marketing campaigns’ can spread at a time when social media start to rule the world (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010)....
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...Social media can be defined as ‘‘a group of Internetbased applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content’’ (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 61)....
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TL;DR: The authors examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, and find that reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon and that an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in relative sales.
Abstract: The authors examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. The authors find that (1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com; (2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in relative sales at that site; (3) for most samples in the study, the impact of one-star reviews is greater than the impact of five-star reviews; and (4) evidence from review-length data suggests that customers read review text rather than relying only on summary statistics.
4,180 citations
TL;DR: Netnography as mentioned in this paper is an online marketing research technique adapted to the study of online communities that provides information on the symbolism, meanings, and consumption patterns of online consumer groups and provides guidelines that acknowledge the inherent flexibility and openness of ethnography, and provide rigor and ethics in the conduct of marketing research.
Abstract: The author develops “netnography” as an online marketing research technique for providing consumer insight. Netnography is ethnography adapted to the study of online communities. As a method, netnography is faster, simpler, and less expensive than traditional ethnography and more naturalistic and unobtrusive than focus groups or interviews. It provides information on the symbolism, meanings, and consumption patterns of online consumer groups. The author provides guidelines that acknowledge the online environment, respect the inherent flexibility and openness of ethnography, and provide rigor and ethics in the conduct of marketing research. As an illustrative example, the author provides a netnography of an online coffee newsgroup and discusses its marketing implications.
3,359 citations
"Two hearts in three-quarter time: H..." refers background in this paper
...This approach, which is referred to in the literature as netnography (Kozinets, 2002), can lead to valuable insights due to its ability to observe consumers in an unobtrusive way....
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TL;DR: Online feedback mechanisms harness the bidirectional communication capabilities of the Internet to engineer large-scale, word-of-mouth networks as discussed by the authors, which has potentially important implications for a wide range of management activities such as brand building, customer acquisition and retention, product development and quality assurance.
Abstract: Online feedback mechanisms harness the bidirectional communication capabilities of the Internet to engineer large-scale, word-of-mouth networks. Best known so far as a technology for building trust and fostering cooperation in online marketplaces, such as eBay, these mechanisms are poised to have a much wider impact on organizations. Their growing popularity has potentially important implications for a wide range of management activities such as brand building, customer acquisition and retention, product development, and quality assurance. This paper surveys our progress in understanding the new possibilities and challenges that these mechanisms represent. It discusses some important dimensions in which Internet-based feedback mechanisms differ from traditional word-of-mouth networks and surveys the most important issues related to their design, evaluation, and use. It provides an overview of relevant work in game theory and economics on the topic of reputation. It discusses how this body of work is being extended and combined with insights from computer science, management science, sociology, and psychology to take into consideration the special properties of online environments. Finally, it identifies opportunities that this new area presents for operations research/management science (OR/MS) research.
2,519 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the effect of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing on member growth at an Internet social networking site and compare it with traditional marketing vehicles is studied. But the authors employ a vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling approach.
Abstract: The authors study the effect of word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing on member growth at an Internet social networking site and compare it with traditional marketing vehicles. Because social network sites record the electronic invitations from existing members, outbound WOM can be precisely tracked. Along with traditional marketing, WOM can then be linked to the number of new members subsequently joining the site (sign-ups). Because of the endogeneity among WOM, new sign-ups, and traditional marketing activity, the authors employ a vector autoregressive (VAR) modeling approach. Estimates from the VAR model show that WOM referrals have substantially longer carryover effects than traditional marketing actions and produce substantially higher response elasticities. Based on revenue from advertising impressions served to a new member, the monetary value of a WOM referral can be calculated; this yields an upper-bound estimate for the financial incentives the firm might offer to stimulate WOM.
2,322 citations