href="http://www.cnn.com">www.cnn.com, www.nytimes.com, or www.washingtonpost.com, you notice that journalists have blogs and that the articles allow for commenting and ratings. Figure 2-1 shows the blogs offered by The New York Times. News sites often integrate video clips as well. With news, your marketing opportunity differs slightly. Consumers are more receptive to the campaigns if your product or service is either contextualized in some form to what they’re reading or is directly targeted toward them. What’s more, marketing programs that have cultural relevance or that are in the context of events in the broader world do better. People simply pay more attention to what is topical versus what distracts them from the stories of the day.FIGURE 2-1: Blogs on The New York Times website.FIGURE 2-2: The Well.
Communication: The Internet continues to be a core communication medium for most people. With the advent of social media, this communication takes place within social networks versus personal websites or via email and instant messenger programs. Microcommunication technologies such as Twitter, which let you communicate in short bursts of information, are very popular. The medium allows consumers to communicate with one another in new, dynamic ways, whether it be through microblogging, leaving notes on friends’ Facebook profiles, commenting on personal blogs, or instant messaging from within websites. In fact, the explosive growth of WhatsApp and its subsequent purchase by Facebook for $19 billion dollars is testament to this trend around microcommunication on a huge scale. When consumers are communicating with each other, they’re less receptive to marketing campaigns unless the campaigns incorporate their communications with their peers in a permissible fashion. This is why social media marketing campaigns that incorporate groups of people are so important. The trickiness of marketing in this context is also why at this point, WhatsApp has no intention of incorporating advertising into its mobile app. That could change in the future, of course.
Community: Online communities and social networks have seen explosive growth in the last few years. The amount of time that people spend on community websites is significantly higher than anywhere else on the web. Online communities include social platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and the more private online communities and forums that are often tied to company websites or niche interests.For example, The Well (shown in Figure 2-2) is one of the most famous, early online communities, just as Facebook is the most popular social network in the United States as we write this. The reasons people participate in online communities are myriad. Suffice it to say, community participation is a key type of activity online. However, when people are engaging with each other, they participate less in marketing campaigns because engaging with one another captures all their attention. They have no time for advertising because they’re busy hearing each other’s opinions. When consumers are searching for information or looking to buy a product, they are more open to advertising. This is exactly why social media marketing, with its unique approach, is important.
E-commerce: Consumers across the country continue to choose to buy more goods online. The fact that the products have to be shipped has done little to hinder many consumers from using the Internet to make retail purchases. The largest online retailer continues to be Amazon (www.amazon.com), with approximately 230 billion dollars in sales each year. E-commerce represents a growing portion of total retail sales. There are some very obvious marketing opportunities in this, especially when peers are asked to recommend products. Great social media marketing opportunities abound here.
Entertainment: No doubt about it — consumers look to the Internet for entertainment. The explosive growth of YouTube and the adoption of high-end video sites such as Hulu (shown in Figure 2-3) are testament to this trend. In fact, Millennials are more likely to turn to the Internet and YouTube in particular for entertainment than they are to look at a television screen. Social games like Fortnite and World of Warcraft, which are social by design, are just another example of this trend. Arguably, entertainment is becoming a driving reason for people to spend more time online, and this is in part thanks to the proliferation of high-bandwidth access in most countries. As long as the marketing is entertaining, consumers will respond to it. They don’t care as much whether it’s an advertisement in these instances.FIGURE 2-3: Hulu.
Services: Another popular consumer activity online is the use of services to allow a person to lead a more efficient and productive life. Whether they’re paying bills, checking bank balances, looking up phone numbers, finding jobs, or searching for apartments, consumers use the Internet as a tool to lead more productive lives. Most of today’s businesses, such as banks and airlines, provide services on the Internet. In fact, consumers now expect today’s businesses to provide their core services online or at least have a presence online. Consumers are typically very task-oriented when they’re interacting with online services; as a result, they don’t expect to participate in advertising campaigns, and especially not social media marketing campaigns, when they’re in this mode.
Business: And of course, the Internet is used to conduct business. This may take the form of companies talking to each other and exchanging information, establishing online marketplaces, and initiating brand launches. Businesses engage with their customers online by marketing and selling products and services and providing customer service via the Internet. Consumers expect these online conveniences from brands that they interact with, and they increasingly engage with businesses on the Internet. They also use the Internet to start their own businesses. Depending on the business, social media marketing campaigns can certainly help here.Critically, if there is any one significant change over the last decade, it is that consumers expect marketing to contribute to their sense of self and their personal needs (whether that’s news, communication, e-commerce, entertainment, services, or business-driven tasks and goals). Marketing that distracts consumers from what they’re trying to accomplish or how they want to feel has a much more difficult time succeeding.
Researching Your Customers’ Online Activities
When developing a social media marketing campaign or a broader, continuing program, determining what your target customers are doing on the Internet is important. You can use several tools to find out where your target customers are going online. Without this information, you can’t formulate a smart social marketing strategy. You’re simply shooting in the dark.
Tools that help you research online activity fall into two basic categories: free and paid. You can simply register for and use the free tools. Tools and services for which you must pay can get expensive very quickly. In Chapter 4, we discuss the paid tools and services, which are more appropriate when you’re planning a specific SMM campaign. In this section, we discuss some of the free tools:
Blog search engines: These search engines crawl (sort through) just the blogosphere for the terms that you input. They search for those terms in the blog posts and the comments, and the searches generally include all publicly viewable blogs on the Internet. If you just want to get a sense of the conversations in the blogosphere about a specific topic or brand, these search engines can help you do that. The most popular one is Blog Search Engine (http://www.blogsearchengine.org), which is shown in Figure 2-4.FIGURE 2-4: Blog Search Engine.A discussion on blog search engines wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the official Twitter search tool (http://search.twitter.com). Twitter is the most popular microblogging platform. Microblogging is similar to blogging except that you’re restricted to a certain number of characters
