Social Media Marketing & Mobile Marketing: A Useful Resource Guide

By Dr. Todd Bacile | August 27, 2013

A question posed to me from a fellow professor last week was, “What books or resources would you recommend for new media marketing topics?” The following books in each subject area highlight marketing philosophies and paradigm shifts that social media and mobile technologies have introduced. I personally have read each of the resources below and see great value in each book.

Follow the Authors on Twitter

Following each book’s summary is a link to the Twitter account(s) for the author(s). If you want more information or have comments for the authors you can connect with them on Twitter!

Connected Consumers

The End of Business as Usual presents a complex “connected consumer” revolution that is taking place. Ubiquitous mobile connections and social networks have created a network economy and interest graphs, where consumers easily share experiences and influence others. The author, Brian Solis, points out that a firm’s marketing audience has now become an audience with an audience of audiences, among many other unique perspectives.

Socialnomics posits that social media has created a people-driven economy through connected networks. The author, Eric Qualman, makes several interesting points, while serving up memorable quotes such as, “The 30-second commercial is being replaced by the 30-second review, tweet, post, status update, and so on.”

Information Transparency

Youtility shows the reader how helpful, useful, relevant information supplied by a firm is turning traditional marketing upside-down. The author, Jay Baer, uses several useful statistics and easy-to-read charts to support his positions. There is business value in these numbers!

Influence Marketing with Social Scoring

Return On Influence presents the topic of social scoring metrics such as Klout and PeerIndex. The author, Mark Schaefer, is well known for his social influence consulting work and discussing Klout on his blog. Influence marketing is controversial for some people and often creates a lot of buzz. This book illustrates how influence and social media go hand-in-hand. In effect, “Influence has been democratized.”

Second Screen Marketing

Social TV shows that the internet has not killed TV. Instead, this book posits that the internet has become TV’s best friend! Examples and cases illustrate TV programs are social; and in combination the web, social media, and mobile devices serve as the second-screen lightning rods to amplify consumer-to-consumer conversations about TV shows. The authors, Mike Proulx and Stacey Shepatin, use strategically placed and QR codes to link to “bonus” content.

Social Media Marketing 101

Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach is geared toward a college course, with a nicely designed array of chapters focusing on social media marketing strategy and planning. The book contains an eight-step social media marketing plan model, along with a completed plan for a fictitious company. The authors are Melissa Barker, Donald Barker, Nicholas Bormann, and Krista Neher.

Mobile Marketing 101

Go Mobile presents a nice array of mobile marketing strategies and topics that any marketer should be familiar with. Mobile optimized ads, SMS campaigns, mobile apps, tablet computing, and location-based marketing examples are plentiful.  The authors, Jeanne Hopkins and Jaime Turner, have a chapter devoted to how several Fortune 500 firms use mobile marketing.

Fundamentals of Mobile Marketing: Theories and Practices is a nice supplement to the prior text. This book delves into a highly technical summary of mobile’s evolution, along with several academic theories and models prevalent to ubiquitous devices. The author, Shintaro Okazaki, is a widely published European marketing professor.

E-Commerce

E-Commerce 2013 is a detailed text delving into the world of E-Commerce, in more detail and in a manner much different from all of the other social and mobile books discussed in this post.  While this book presents many cases and chapter information that intertwines with social and mobile, the book is devoted to E-Commerce with a progression through an intro section, the technology infrastructure, business concepts, and E-Commerce in action. The authors are Kenneth Laudon and Carol Guercio Traver.

The Microblogging Mindset

The Tao of Twitter is the best book I have found that steps a person through the beginning stages of learning to Tweet to advanced Twitter usage relevant to business goals and strategy. The author, Mark Schaefer, is the same author on this list for Return On Influence and Born to Blog.

Twitter Power also takes a humorous – and useful – look into Twitter. You know the book will have some fun content when you realize that the author, Joel Comm, was the inventor of the iFart app.

The Blogging Mindset

Born to Blog  walks the reader through the beginning stages – and struggles – people may have when blogging. It then progresses to tips and writing techniques needed to become a successful blogger, regardless of your industry. The book contains several personal experiences of the blogging challenges and triumphs that the authors, Mark Schaefer and Stanford Smith, have gone through.

Of course, this list is not exhaustive for the sake of maintaining brevity in a single blog post. There are many other excellent resources available; and in many other topic areas. What books have you found useful to navigate social and/or mobile media?

Dr. Todd Bacile (@toddbacile) is a Marketing Professor at Loyola University New Orleans and holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from Florida State University. He teaches Electronic Marketing and Advanced Marketing Strategy.  Social Media Marketing Magazine ranks him as one of the Top 100 Marketing Professors on Twitter. Have a question or comment? Post it here and you will receive a response.

Real-time Engagement Using Social Media: The Qualtrics Case

By Dr. Todd Bacile | August 21, 2013

Social Media Engagement

A benefit that social media has over mass media is the ability to hypertarget individual consumers. While much is made of hypertargeting advertisements, another non-invasive communication strategy is for a brand to engage with consumers in real-time, as needed by an individual person. Personalized content relevant to a segment of one person.

For marketers to successfully engage consumers via social channels in this manner, a brand must provide context-specific relevant information, when and where a consumer needs it. Jay Baer refers to such highly useful content with his conceptualization of Youtility. To provide useful information in this manner takes more than hypertargeting advertisements: it requires a firm to provide helpful information a consumer would like to see at a particular moment.

For a firm to truly achieve relevance, authenticity, helpfulness, and information availability when needed by a consumer requires real-time engagement. A simple operationalized example happened to me in a Tweet chat last week. Here is a recap of how one firm successfully engaged consumers in real-time.

Qualtrics: Real-time Engagement

Among the ways I use Twitter is to participate in Tweet chats and help others by answering questions. Tweet chats are easily facilitated using a hashtag on Twitter. One chat I participate in is the #AskAngel tweet chat every Tuesday from 2:00-3:00 pm EST hosted by @afmarcom. The thing I love about this chat is the range of questions people ask, along with the helpful people who choose to answer. Below is a snippet of last week’s #AskAngel chat, where Holly posed a question for the group:

The screenshots from the #AskAngel Tweet chat depict an organic (i.e. non-paid) real-time conversation about a brand as discussed by consumers. The conversation continues with retweets, replies, and favorites as the conversation unfolds:

Brands understand that mining social conversations can produce useful marketing information. However, Qualtrics took this one step further by joining in the conversation in real-time as it was unfolding.

The customer service people manning the Qualtrics Twitter handle tactfully jumped into the conversation in real-time. The above conversation achieves several things for Qualtrics. First, the brand is exposed to in-depth qualitative data about what consumers like about its product. Second, consumer-endorsed positive word-of-mouth is exchanged among several people; and retweeted or shared to other social networks and followers. Third, Qualtrics provides a useful resource (a link to their online Qualtrics University) when another curious consumer asks for more information. This was most likely totally unexpected by the Tweet chat participants!

There is a certain “Wow” factor associated with such an exchange. It shows the brand is listening, cares about helping consumers, and does not use a sales pitch in an effort to close a sale. It is real-time social media engagement strategies such as the one pulled off by Qualtrics that enables brands to begin to build relationships with consumers.

Dr. Todd Bacile (@toddbacile) is a Marketing Professor at Loyola University New Orleans and holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from Florida State University. Social Media Marketing Magazine ranks him as one of the Top 100 Marketing Professors on Twitter. Have a question or comment? Post it here and you will receive a response.

Social Media Complaints and Dysfunctional Consumers

By Dr. Todd Bacile | July 17, 2013

Synopsis: consumers who are choosing to use social media to complain to brands about legitimate issues are being met in some instances by fellow consumers exhibiting dysfunctional behavior, such as casting insults to a complainant while defending a brand. This is creating new challenges for brands from a customer service perspective.

Social Media Complaints

Social media are conduits for consumers to share complaints and seek resolution with brands. Even a brand’s most desired customers may post a complaint to a brand’s Facebook page, Twitter feed, or Google+ page. This is positive for firms attempting to resolve complaints, as research shows consumers who receive a complaint resolution have a higher probability of repeat business versus consumers who do not receive a resolution. For the brands that ignore or delete  social media complaints, watch out for the fall out!

Social media complaint resolution is an extension of traditional service support now entering virtual social media pages owned by brands. A company’s social media page is a virtual service setting, where consumers have expectations of a brand’s attentiveness to comments and complaints. Companies are realizing social media complaints must be addressed. Timeliness is a factor, too, as many consumers believe a firm should respond to social media complaints within an hour.

However, the presence of dysfunctional consumers is creating new challenges for firms in social media complaint resolution.

Dysfunctional Consumers

Dysfunctional consumers are individuals who exhibit some form of misbehavior that negatively affects other consumers, employees, or a brand. Examples include people in a service setting acting rudely, using vulgar or abusive language, making unreasonable demands, or even illegal acts such as theft or physical assault. Basically, any violation of acceptable norms of behavior in a business setting. Why should brands care? Dysfunctional consumers negatively affect other consumers’ satisfaction with a brand, future purchase intent, and brand loyalty.

Dysfunctional consumers are entering social media complaint and resolution scenarios. Occasionally, a dysfunctional consumer may interject in another consumer’s complaint posted to a brand. A typical example is a response from a dysfunctional consumer that defends a brand while insulting or degrading the complainant. Below is an actual screenshot (redacted for anonymity) from my research:

I interviewed a social media marketing company’s executive manager. He was asked how he deals with situations where “Consumer A” complains to the brand and “Consumer B” insults “Consumer A” in the thread. “We represent the brand and only reply to the complainant. We don’t do anything with other people who comment or respond, even when they border on insults. Unless it’s extremely offensive, we let consumer interactions work itself out.”

Stimulated by his response, I proceeded to collect data from several brands’ Facebook wall posts over several weeks. Thousands of consumer posted wall posts were content analyzed. Hundreds of posts were categorized as complaints. Several complaints had dysfunctional consumer responses that insulted the complainant, while defending the brand. Guess how many times a brand addressed a dysfunctional consumer insulting the complaining consumer? Zero!

Dysfunction and Complaints: A New Challenge

Findings from my research suggest brands are mishandling these complaining interactions. Brands are adapting traditional in-person complaint resolution tactics as if a dyadic conversation is occurring. Within the traditional complaint dyad there is a brand communicating with a single complainant, while all other consumers are uninvolved. However, social media complaints are one-to-many (or many-to-many) conversations instead of the one-to-one dyad brands are familiar with.

When dysfunctional consumer responses enter a complaint thread, companies should not only respond to the complaint in a favorable manner, but also address the dysfunctional response (i.e. ‘We appreciate your comments, but please maintain a polite atmosphere on our Facebook page’). This is how traditional in-person service settings operate. Service managers in in-person settings have a responsibility to maintain a peaceful atmosphere by attending to consumer misbehavior. Social media should be no different as consumers consider these interactions to be virtual service encounters in a brand’s environment.

Todd Bacile (@toddbacile) is a Marketing Professor at Loyola University New Orleans. Social Media Marketing Magazine ranks him as one of the Top 100 Marketing Professors on Twitter. The content posted here is a small portion of larger social media complaint studies he is currently conducting. Questions or comments regarding social media complaints are welcome.