Social Media Approach as a Marketing Tool 1. Introduction Social media isn’t a new “Internet Hip” that just popped up, but it has been around for years in the shape of forums and newsgroups. So what has changed? The introduction of various new tools and the tremendous increase of the internet user base in the last decade along with easier internet access gave the big push. To best define social media, we need to break it down. Social is relating to human society; the interaction of the individual and the group. Media is a medium of cultivation, conveyance, or expression (Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary). So, social media is a media designed to be disseminated through social interaction, created using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one-to- many aka traditional media) into social media dialogues (many-to-many). Primarily, social media depends on interactions between people –as discussions and integration of words – using technology as a conduit. Social media has been touted as presenting a fresh direction for marketing by allowing companies to talk with consumers, as opposed to talking at them (Wikipedia). It lives on the contributions and feedback of everyone. It eliminates the gap between the writers and the readers and forms a conversation-like content. As mentioned earlier, social media comes in the forms of various online tools or services. These can be categorized into numerous groups each with its own characteristics and usages. To elaborate, blogs, for example, aka web logs are an online journal for the writers to share their experiences, opinions, and thoughts while providing the readers the option add their feedback and comments to the topic. Social networks are online service websites consists of personal or commercial profiles of their users, their social relationships, and offer a variety of other activities (Wikipedia). Micro-blogging is a networking service that allows mobile users of cell phones and other Internet connected devices to stay attentive of activities within a group by receiving frequently published updates, typically of 140 characters or less. Text messages are uploaded to a micro-blogging server, and then distributed to group members (R. Kayne). Social bookmarking is a service that provides its users with the ability to store, organize, share, search, and rate bookmarks for web pages. There is also a specialized form of social bookmarking sites known as social news where users vote on articles and news. These are some of the social media variations available and are the most influential ones for businesses, There are others but are not mentioned as they are either hold no significant use toward the purpose of this document or reside outside its scope. 2. The gain of adopting Social Media Marketing Social media provides companies with the capability to closely reach a large number of consumers providing similar experience to direct marketing with much lower costs. It gives you the opportunity to take advantage of the power of word of mouth (WOM) or in this case electronic one. According to a study done by Steffes and Burgee from Towson University, the information the students gained from eWOM is more influential in their decision than speaking with friends in person (2008). Also, according to Alexa, A web traffic monitoring company, out of the top 10 most visited websites in the world, four are social ones and the rest are general search engines. Looking at Malaysia’s top 10, the number increases to five with the first spot occupied by Facebook –a social networking website (Alexa.com). Social networks like Facebook has over 350 million active users of which 70% are international ones with an average time spend of 55 minutes per day (facebook.com); MySpace –another social network –has over 100 million active users (myspace.com); Technorati has more than 133 million indexed blogs (January 2009) and 77% of active internet users are reading blogs (Adam Singer, 2009). Being able to influence even a small portion of a consumer base of this magnitude will produce noticeable results despite the difficulty of relating social activities to a percentage of revenue. Bear in mind that Social Media Marketing (SMM) is not to be used to sell, at least not directly. However, SMM is used to generate awareness and exposure to the business, reduce overall marketing expenses, increase traffic or subscribers to own website, create new business partnership, rise up in search ranking, improved PR, and an ending with more loyal customers (Michael Stelzner, 2009). If approached with intent to sell, internet users are now are savvy, they will be able to smell you coming and will shun you immediately. 3. The Way to Successful Social Media Utilization The use of social media as a marketing tool –if done right – can yield into huge benefits. To fully utilize the social media, the organization should include it in their marketing planning as it needs a careful preparation to know the medium best suited for the company’s activities. Unfortunately, lots of people look at social media as a free marketing tool, leading into little planning which in return yields no benefits and in some cases even negative ones. While it might not take much -if any- financial wise, social media marketing do consume a lot of time. On the other hand, the financial requirement makes it the best choice for start up companies and individuals. The first step in the plan is to see if social media is suitable for you as it is not for everybody. Businesses with products targeted at elderly or retired people, won’t generate much benefits from using it. Also, companies with tight government regulation supervision shouldn’t pick social media as a marketing tool. After ensuring that you belong with the majority, whose social media engagement suits their activities, you have to decide on your objectives; the desired results from engaging into social media. This in return will help in choosing the best suited tools (Anita Campbell, 2009). This paper will cover in some details a part of these tools and their uses later. Within the social sphere, organizations can’t push their messages or products to the consumer; rather they have to lure the consumer toward them. To be able to achieve that, the message should attain certain attributes to be considered attractive enough to lure them. First of all, the message should sound familiar to the target audience. People like to communicate with each other. Try reaching them, listening to their ideas and thoughts, and then formulate your message. Adding a budget to the mix in the form of incentives can encourage much better feedback as well as help spread the word associated with the incentives. The third element that can be thrown to the mix is fame. Providing the audience with a chance of fame, be it as small as it gets, it can really stimulate the audiences interest. The forth element is the fun, entertaining one, which is shared with most of the online activities. Adding the fun entertaining factor can excite the audience to spread the word. Lastly, the message should contain the mobility factor; the ability to move from one person to the next (Richard Clark, 2009). Having at least one the first four elements along with the last one will encourage a beneficial response from the community. An organization should continue to listen to the community as long as it is in business. Since anyone can say anything, a company should always keep an eye on the sphere. Listen to what the communities say about it. This help in controlling bad press and empowering good ones. Of course, monitoring the blogosphere may seem impossible, fortunately, there are some tools that keeps the company notified whenever a new entry with its name appear in the wild. 4. The Way to a Catastrophic Social Media Utilization As beneficial as SMM can be, a misuse or unplanned approach can result in a total waste of resources. Lacking a staff member who can handle a frequent delivery of quality content can degrade the social effort. Also, the absence of a strong message that can create a community around it will result in a partial loss for the impact on people. Social media is global, so, cautious should be practiced at all times to avoid any offending messages. Not only that, a corporation should realize that social media is an open platform and there is no such thing as off-the-record and for that not only should they monitor their own channels but also their employees. There have been many incidents where companies had to fire their employees for inappropriate messages posted in their own personal spaces. One famous incident when Delta Airlines had to fire Ellen Simonetti a flight attendant over inappropriate pictures posted in her blog in the company’s uniform (Ellen Simonetti, 2005). To avoid such incidents, the organization should provide clear guidelines to what is appropriate and what is not when it comes to their social messages. 5. Blogs We have mentioned earlier different social media tools that can be utilized to the benefit of the organization. Now, we will discuss these in further details while providing real examples for the usages of these tools by other organizations or individuals. Starting with blogs, which as mentioned earlier is a website with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material usually maintained by one person with few exceptions where they are maintained by a group of people depending on the function or goal of the blog. Blogs also give the readers the ability to leave their comments in an interactive format.