Marketing in Social Media

Social media are online communities where people gather from the safety of their own homes to correspond with already existing friends or simply to converse about a shared topic. Social media have become the largest growing platforms on the internet. Newspaper articles are no longer one sided, but feature blogs so readers can comment on stories. Sites such as Facebook and Twitter serve the same purpose as telephone or e-mail yet have become more commonplace in daily lives. Whether we, as a public, like it or not, social media is here to stay.

David Meerman Scott’s article, Social Media Debate contemplates the issue of what social media really entails. He defines the term using the Merriam-Webster definitions “social” and “media” which mean “of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of a society” and “a medium of cultivation, conveyance, or expression”, respectively. To further elaborate, he uses the EContent 100 definition of social media: “Social media describes the way people share ideas, content, thoughts, and relationships online” specifically user-created content.

Suzanne Kapner’s discusses in her Fortune article how businesses attempt to use networking sites like Facebook as marketing outlets. Advertisers realize the enormous value is harnessing the 150 million users of Facebook as a client base. CNN and CBS used applications (‘apps’) to track user’s activities to find its targets. Facebook itself has attempted several marketing techniques such as Connect and Beacon which allowed users to see what friends were doing online, specifically what they were shopping for. These attempts were to no avail, though.

Megan Garber, a staff writer at the Columbia Journalism Review, reviews the newly transparent United States government by checking out the recently improved WhiteHouse.gov. She mentions the open-ended blog that gives the feeling of person-on-government conversation. This allows anyone to state how he or she feels about a newly passed piece of legislation.

Auren Hoffman of Business Week Online reports that recent studies by Rapleaf show that the majority of people using social networking sites are women. This is due to male tendencies to seek out more competitive options such as video games and poker when in front of the computer. Even so, women are more social than men on these sites by establishing and building relationships. This attribute attracts marketers more than men.