Mills, Adam J. and Kirk Plangger. "Social Media Strategy for Online Service Brands." Service Industries Journal, vol. 35, no. 10, July 2015, pp. 521-536. Amanda Caron

From Digital Culture & Society

Amanda Caron IASC 3P90 Article 3

This article focuses on how major companies have strategized and change their marketing needs to focus on social media. Social media is one of the newest aspects of technology that allows users to post various types of content. This is great for businesses because they get the chance to promote themselves on many different platforms and meet a get their name out to numerous potential customers. This article goes into detail about companies such as IBM, Dell, Starbucks, Burger King, PepsiCo, Levi, and Ford and how they use social media to their advantage. Each company uses social media in such different ways and it is neat to see how each company uses each different platform to their advantage.

Business is forever changing and especially how marketing is done. “Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical shift in how business in conducted and how people cooperate.” (p.4445) Different companies with different types of social media applications that better their marketing needs. For example, IBM does not only promote on social media, but owns more then 100 different blogs, several official Twitter accounts, accounts on YouTube and SlideShare. “Dell has tapped the power of social media with its hugely popular IdeaStorm website, where users add thoughts for new creation lines and enhancement, choose them up or down, and comment on submission. Because of the site, Dell has ongoing to ship computers with Linux install, and has added community carry.” (p.4445) Like Dell Starbucks also has created their own idea site, MyStarbucks Idea Site, where customers are able to share their ideas, vote on ideas, and also comment on others ideas. Burger King on the other hand has tacken a different approach to their use of social media. “The burger chain offered Facebook users a free Whopper coupon if they would "unfriend" 10 of their social network connections.” (p.4445) Each company is using social in such a diverse way and catering to their unique customer base. Social media is not only Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Everything from a website to a blog, to a YouTube video, to a post on Pinterest will reach a different costumer on a different platform. And each company notices these different platforms and the differences between them and picks the platforms that best suit their marketing needs.

My favorite concept within the article is, “Social media is about ordinary people taking control of the world around them and finding creative new ways to bring their collective voices together to get what they want.” (p.4452) This quotation embodies what social media is all about, creativity, and all of these companies use social media and creativity to benefit them. Another great aspect of this article besides showing what platforms companies use to their advantage, it also goes over all of the different platforms/applications that can be considered social media and how they help businesses if they market using them. It goes over the features certain applications have, such as Facebook, and how companies can use them. For example, Facebook has promotions, crowd sourcing, check-ins, games, and social shopping. One of the best free marking aspects of Facebook to me is check-ins because customers get the chance to share that they were at your establishment and all of their friends are able to see that and possibly help your business reach new customers.

A great aspect to this article is that they took common social media platforms and showed a percentage of who are using them. The highest being Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They oddly did not show Instagram. The article also goes into detail about blogging and the benefits of them for social media marketing, “Blogs influence roughly one in five readers at important purchase decision stages… blogs help consumers discover products and services, refine choices, get support and answers, and decide on a specific product or service.” (p.4446) The article also touches on the idea of, “interacting with or attracting the interest of current or prospective customers through the channels of social media” (p 4451), which is one of the greatest aspects of social media. Companies are able to interact to potential customers through using social media. The article also broke down the benefits and uses or each type of social media and went over thirteen different types of applications that can be considered social media. While goes over all of the different social media platforms the article also goes over important information on how each platform can benefit your business. For example when discussing media sharing sites they expressed that, “ Online marketing is about providing current and potential customers with interesting, informative content. This includes images. Because many photo sharing sites are free, a business's biggest investment is time.” (p. 4448)

Throughout the article I was very surprised to only have Instagram mentioned once, and briefly. Instagram is one of the main applications where small businesses do their marketing. It is a free app and enables businesses to post and reach out to anyone they desire. Instagram is one of the best ways to interact with your potential customers because you can view their profile, like their photos/ comment on them, or respond to their comments on your own post. Lastly, the article did reference some outdated information that is off topic. For example, Facebook taking over MySpace statistics is not very relevant to the point of the article. Since MySpace is not used anymore, it should not have been in the article.