Social Media in Marketing

 Recently I am attending the Strategic Marketing Communication Program in Interpublic Group(IPG).

During the training, we learned and practiced the key elements in Marketing communication. When we case-studied one corporation" Ports", I came up with some view of social media on the context of Marketing.

As we all know, there are four circles essential to a successful marketing communcation-clients, brands, delivery and content. In the midst, "delivery" is critically important as a bridge between organizations and republics.

Time is changing. In the past, the model of delivery was called " push" model. The "push" model showed the traditional process of persuation: The corporates just put the selective information in front of audience. It's one-way communication. However, in today's such complicated and different communication environment, the model of delivery became to " pull", which means audience are now more willing to discover the deep information from various resources by themselves. This change helps the delivery of message, but also makes the delivery hard to control.

In this "pull" model, social media is one of the three basic online systems used mostly by audience to visit the media. Another two media are Internet/ Search Engine and Mobile phones. From this fact, we could see the importance of social media. And that's why most marketers use social media as tools.

" We don't have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it!" Erik Qualman said. Actually, most young people are using social media. And I believe the most users of social media belong to the young generation. From this point, I began to think whether how a brand treats social media will decide, to some extent, which group of customers it will have in the future.

Take the case of " Ports" as example. This is a Chinese brand which always intends to be luxury and sets the
high-end people as the target audience, especially successful women. So Ports became a synonym of " mature" and "stereotype". This could be confirmed by the participation of Ports in social media. The followers of Sina weibo is just 4498 which is so miserable compared to those well-known brands such as Chanel and Coach. The messages delivered by this Sina weibo is just 129. According to this, we could see Ports doest not take social media into serious consideration. I should not judge the strategy of Ports. However, this will lead to a risk of losing such a huge amount of potential group, for other similar brands are trying their best to interact with audience and show their customer-friendlyness at the same time.

Ports' Ignorance of social media may judge from the fact that most of current customers are not Weibo fans. However, the ignorance of social media will result in the very difficulty to discover a new and young customer group which will become the target audience someday. Now Ports wants to deliver a fashion and energetic image. But without social media, I doubt the efficiency of its effort.