I remember I was in Grade 9 when I finally got convinced by my friend Grace to get a Facebook account. It was the beginning of my new life.
By new life, I don’t actually mean it literally. By new life, I mean: going home everyday from school and then go on facebook for 3 hours and then start working on my homework and then go on facebook again. Whenever I tried to study, there would be a voice in my head telling me to go on Facebook. (I’m NOT crazy though, so don’t worry.) This is how influential social media can be. It gets people addicted.
An this is why social media can be such a powerful tool for businesses to stay connected with customers. People never get bored or tired of social media.
Here are some examples of successful social media marketing campaigns:
Burger King’s Whopper Sarcrifice application on Facebook
Sony Ericsson’s viral approach in marketing the Xperia on YouTube
And here’s a funny (but fake) example of a social media/information technology campaign:
If used appropriately and ethically, social media is indeed a very good medium for companies to market its products/services to customers. Social media opens up an entirely new horizon with endless possibilities and creativity. Most importantly and again – people in today’s world are related to social media in some sort of way. For example, every student in COMM 101 needs to create a blog and this is already considered social media.
Wow… sweet… so online communities is the perfect place for marketing because NOTHING bad can happen… and it’s cheap!!!!!!!! Well there could be a lot of problems. Words spread really quickly on the Internet. While a company can advertise and promote a product online, online users can also spread rumours (some stories could be real) online. And those words spread really quickly too. Many times on Facebook we see petition groups that are petitioning agains something. And there are always thousands of people who join. Once a company’s reputation is ruined and the words are spread online, it will take a lot of time (AND money) to rebuild the company’s image.