CHAPTER 9 CASE STUDY : Social Commerce Creates New Customer Relationships

1.) Assess the people, organization, and technology issues for using social media to engage with customers.

 

To most of the people used Facebook and twitter to keep touch with friend and to let them learn and know what there are doing. Social media like Facebook and Twitter have transformed the way some businesses think about advertising. For all type of companies, Facebook and twitter has become powerful tool for engaging customers. Companies can use Facebook and twitter to make trade off, promotion, and services to make a business without spend significant cost. For service, location based on business such as gourmet food trucks can tweet their current location to loyal followers and fans. Appointment-based businesses can easily tweet or post cancellations and unexpected openings. Larger companies of all sizes have an opportunity run sweepstakes and promotions and other all size of companies have an opportunity to shape the perception of their brands and to solidify relationships with their customers. Companies have running out that capitalize on the social media feature if Facebook to achieve greater visibility. For example, Facebook have feature the ability to like a brand, send a virtual gift, answer a pool question, and instantly stream information to your news feed. Twitter has developed many new offering like promoted tweets and promoted trend. These features give advertisers the ability to have their tweets displayed more prominently when twitter users search for certain keyword. 

2.) What are the advantage and disadvantage of using social media for advertising, brand building, market research and customer service? 

 

Advantage:

The advantage of advertising in social media marketing is cost-related. The majority of social media web sites are free to access, create a profile and post information. The advantage of reaching your targeted market was little or no cash investment wanted, and the audience wanting your information was voluntarily joins and follows you. The viral nature of social media means that each person who reads your posts has the capability to spread the news wide within his own network, so information can reach a large number of people in a short time. 

That result shows just how highly CMOs (chief marketing officer) rate the brand building advantage of social media. Chief marketing officer (CMO) is a corporate executive responsible for marketing activities in an organization. Considering the size of the potential market on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter, it’s an obvious brand opportunity. Brand building was the original reason for businesses to join social media. The math was basic but they produce favorable results 900 million people on Facebook, even accessing 0.001% of that would provide a huge opportunity. Even though businesses have identified other advantages of social media, brand building is still a key part of the plan. The research provided further evidence of this as over 80% of CMOs agree that social marketing can have a measurable impact on brand awareness and brand loyalty. For example, Levi’s was one of the first national brands to use Facebook and twitter to allow customer to socialize and share their purchases with friend. The Levi’s Facebook page have 500,000 ‘like’ message posted by friends sharing their favorite jeans.

Disadvantage:

The disadvantage of in social media marketing is updating the social media accounts take time and effort. A senior person with knowledge about the company and products should handle your social media presence, and the cost in time means the media is not completely free. It is ongoing work to find new angles about your products continually and to post and re-post information. The information is only visible for a short time before newer posts replace it. In addition, publishing obvious advertising copy is unacceptable in the social media world, therefore you must present the information in the form of conversation or you will lose followers.

3.） Should all companies use Facebook and twitter for customer service and advertising? Why or why not? What kinds of companies are best suited to use this platform?  

In my opinion, all type or size company should use Facebook and twitter for customer service and advertising. The company can use social media to provide good customer service through e mail, special message, and private password, web access to special areas for top customers to their customer.  Why? Because now a day most of the companies make business in sell its products or services to customers over the internet from facebook and twitter. The results show that which companies use social media was increase their sale and gain more profit. Companies using facebook and twitter to advertising and provide customer service to engage customers. These critically help their companies to gain profit. For example levi’s, within the first week of its share campaign, levi’s received 4,000 ‘like’.

The company began using twitter in 2010 by creating a ‘Levi’s guy’ to interest customers. He has over 6,000 followers and is responsible for responding to queries and engaging in conversations about the Levi’s brand on twitter. In 2011, the company creates a personalized friend store where shoppers can see what their friends ‘like’ and brought. These not only show that the people who ‘like’ the page, it is clearly show that the Levi’s company demand was increase drastically. When the demand increase the company was advantage in gain high profit.  Even the Facebook and twitter posting was always get complain but advertiser may still benefit.