MKTG480:

Introduction

The focus of this lesson is to provide you with a history of the World Wide Web and an introduction to Web 2.0 and the social media revolution. As a “digital native,” you’re probably unable to think of a time when the World Wide Web and social media were not a part of your life. We’ll discuss the scope and the ever-changing landscape of social media.

In addition, we’ll categorize the different types of social media by breaking them down into “zones.” We’ll discuss the general principles that apply to all social media—regardless of zones—as well as discuss the defining characteristics of social media and examine its infrastructure.

Finally, we'll briefly touch on how standard marketing techniques can work in a social media landscape and how those standard techniques can be altered slightly to be more effective.

Objectives

After you complete this lesson, you should be able to do the following:

• Provide a basic definition for social media.
• Describe the social media value chain.
• Explain the current significance of social media in society and business.
• Identify the four zones of social media and distinguish between them.
• Identify basic principles and characteristics of social media marketing.
• Explain how marketing can influence the consumer buying process.

Readings and Activities

By the end of this lesson, make sure you have completed the readings and activities found in Lesson 1 of the Course Schedule.

A Brief History of the World Wide Web

The beginnings of the internet can be traced back to the mid-1960s. Before that time, businesses were able to share files and information within their own networks, but "internetwork" communication and file sharing were virtually nonexistent.

From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, companies developed internetwork capabilities to communicate and share files between networks. These internetworks functioned reasonably well but were still cumbersome, mostly due to the fact that there was no standard code or computer language to facilitate the sharing. Every network used its own code, meaning that the networks needed to not only communicate but translate as well.

In the mid to late 1970s, researchers worked to create a common language or interface for networks. The result of this search for a common language was the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP. The advent of TCP/IP kicked off the spread of the internet to most of the world. By the end of the 1980s, most nations in Europe and Asia were connected to networks all over the world. However, the internet was still very limited in use. It was used by some government agencies, some big businesses, and a few large universities, but the general public still knew very little about the internet.

In 1989, researchers began working with something they called hypertext. Advances in hypertext led to the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and hypertext markup language (HTML). HTML began as a way for researchers working at CERN (European Laboratory for Particle Physics) to allow researchers from various sites to organize, share, and search their documents by linking them together. This created the "web" structure that would eventually become the web as we know it. In 1994, the first World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in Geneva. Although large companies were hesitant in embracing this innovation, by 1996 it was difficult for a company to dismiss the necessity for a web presence. The first wave of web information had a distinctly static-and-push function. The second wave of the internet was distinctly more social and dynamic, allowing people to participate in more dynamic sharing, making, entertainment, and e-commerce. The proliferation of mobile devices made it possible for people to engage in these activities from anywhere, thus fueling the ubiquity of access and activity.

In the early 2000s, a handful of companies developed business models tailored to a web-based environment by utilizing the affordances of asynchronous communication, e-commerce, and user agency. These companies included Google's search engine, Amazon's department store, travel booking sites, and business review sites like Angie's List.

It was during this time that developers and programmers began to see the value of allowing users to provide their own web content. They began working on the websites, pages, and platforms that would eventually become known as social media.

Web 2.0

For the first 10 or so years of its existence, the flow of information on the World Wide Web had a vertical structure. You can think of this information flow as a triangle or pyramid. Content was created by a small group of content producers or providers at the top of the triangle and was read or observed by a much larger group of consumers at the bottom. 

Information seldom—if ever—went in the opposite direction. Consumers were unable to contact the content providers or share information with other consumers.

In the early 2000s, programmers began to change the landscape of the World Wide Web. Sites like Amazon.com began to give users the ability to share their thoughts on products and provide ratings. Not only could users provide their own feedback, but other users could also read these reviews and ratings. Consumers suddenly had a much louder voice in the online marketplace.

At the same time, social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook quickly became appropriated by youth culture. The practice of creating user-generated media and sharing it (often for free or through open sourcing) became a dominant characteristic of the web. This kind of do-it-yourself/maker movement and real-time sharing was described as the democratization of the web, or Web 2.0. Along with blogs, RSS feeds, video sharing, and mash-up sites, service-oriented start-ups became popular.

The standard top-to-bottom method of content distribution was replaced on these sites with a more lateral approach to communication and sharing. This shift is often referred to as the horizontal revolution. Information now flows up the triangle and down, as well as side to side. Everyone is in on the conversation, and everyone has an equal stake.

The social media landscape continued (and continues) to grow, with new forms of information sharing popping up every day.

Reasons for Social Media Marketing

Despite its prevalence, there are still plenty of business owners and business professionals who don’t see the advantages of having a social media presence. Should you happen to encounter any of those doubtful individuals, here are some reasons you can provide.

What Are the Social Media Zones?

Tuten and Solomon (2015) define social media as “the online means of communication, conveyance, collaboration, and cultivation among interconnected and interdependent networks of people, communities, and organizations enhanced by technological capabilities and mobility.” It’s a cumbersome and complex definition, but that’s to be expected. The term social media covers so much ground that it’s impossible to capture it all in just a few words. As a way of making it a little more digestible as a concept, we’ll break down social media into four types of “zones."

Social Media Zones

As you click through each zone, think about what social activities you engage in on a daily basis and what tools you use.

Social Media: Defining Characteristics

As described earlier in our lesson, Web 2.0 offers a cost-effective solution that provides a host of features to both users and marketers alike. These features include the ability to operate on multiple platforms, the collective wisdom of users, user interfaces that are interactive and easy to use, and much more. In order to effectively use social media as a marketing tool, it is important to understand these features.

The Infrastructure of Social Media

As a student of social media marketing, recognizing the defining factors of the social media field and how they work together will benefit you as you develop your ability to create marketing strategies and tactics. The social media value chain organizes the complex environment of social media into its core components. The chain illustrates the core activities of social media users and the components that make those interactions possible.

Infrastructure refers to the basic underlying framework or features of a system or organization. When referencing a country, infrastructure often refers to roads, bridges, railroad tracks, data transmitters, and the people who keep them up and running. The same is true of the World Wide Web and social media. The infrastructure of a social media site includes the following:

• Social software—Behind every social media application is a lot of code that makes it function properly. The underlying software makes it possible for social media to do all of the things that they do. It facilitates interaction between users. It allows users to create content; share content; analyze, search, and sort content; and more. The software includes both the web interfaces (meaning the websites we visit to view pages, like X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook) and the mobile apps or widgets that we use to interact with social media.
• Devices—Of course, we can’t participate in social media without some sort of device. In the early days, this meant our desktop personal computers. Today, we use social media on all manner of devices, including laptops, tablets, smartphones, and more. Devices also include other electronics that produce online content, including webcams, flip cams, and other digital photography and video devices. As the world of social media continues to grow, portability has become a key attribute of social-media-enabled devices.
• People—Of course, all social media software must be written by people (programmers), and all of the devices must be created by people (engineers, designers, laborers, etc.). And going even further, all of the software and all of the devices are completely worthless without people to use them. In the social media landscape, every user is a potential author or contributor.

Monetizing Social Media

Because signing up for the various social media outlets is often free, we sometimes forget that social media outlets are moneymaking endeavors for their creators.

Many social media outlets rely on the same form of revenue creation that has been associated with other forms of media for some time: advertisements. In particular, these social media employ the interruption-disruption model of advertising. This model of advertising is employed by television marketers (those 30-to-60-second commercials we watch during our favorite television shows), as well as by print marketers (those one- or two-page ads we see in magazines, and those ads of all shapes and sizes in newspapers and other print publications).

Some social media (such as Facebook) use the same kind of advertising, displaying ads both on the side of your news feed and interspersed with the other content on your social media page.

Other social media outlets rely on psychic income. Users who regularly curate information on a wiki may receive a high rating for their work. Someone who contributes regularly on an app that rates restaurants may similarly be rewarded with advanced status. These kinds of “psychic rewards” add satisfaction to a user’s experience and often adequately replace any kind of potential monetary compensation.

The Fifth P of Marketing

We know from the study of marketing that there are four "Ps” that make up a marketing mix:

1. product,
2. price,
3. promotion, and
4. place (or distribution).

When thinking about social media marketing, we need to add a fifth P to the mix. That P is participation. Rather than employing a top-to-bottom approach, as is the case with traditional marketing, social media marketing must allow the user to have input. Studies show that consumer reviews are trusted more than traditional marketing methods. It therefore makes sense for marketers to pay attention to consumer reviews, respond to them when necessary, and make use of them whenever appropriate.

Marketers traditionally have made use of three types of media:

• paid media—television commercials, print magazine ads, other promotional messaging;
• owned media—your business’s web page or e-commerce site; and
• earned media—news stories generated by press releases, participation in community events, and so on.

Social media brings with it another form of media that is not so easily defined. It might feel like a type of owned media because you set up a profile on a social media site (such as Facebook). But the truth is that the corporation or entity that owns that site has complete and total jurisdiction over what you can and cannot post on the site. Moreover, the community (users of the site who have connected to your page) has the ability to post and say whatever it likes about your organization.

Rather than trying to control or dictate that conversation—as we would with traditional marketing techniques—it is, instead, recommended to take a different approach. Social media marketers are advised to do the following (from Tuten & Solomon, 2018, p. 26):

• Listen to the customer conversations.
• Analyze those conversations.
• Relate this information to existing information within your enterprise. 
• Act on those customer conversations.

In other words, social media marketing often necessitates taking a break from promoting and first listening to and taking in customer feedback, and then responding in an appropriate fashion.

Social media marketers can take on many different roles in establishing methods of communication and promotion through social media outlets. These various careers are outlined in detail near the end of the first chapter in our text.

Lesson Summary

Social media revolutionized and continue to revolutionize the way that users communicate and interact online. Because social media have become so ingrained in our daily lives, it’s easy to take them for granted and lose sight of the potential that exists for communication, interaction, and marketing.

It's important for marketers to understand what came before social media, how social media changed the landscape, and how it differs from other methods of publication and communication. It’s also important to understand that, while traditional marketing methods can be applied to social media platforms, they must be adapted in order to be effective.

Looking at the term social media, the most important word is social. People come to social media platforms to share similar interests and communicate with people who have those interests in common. As a social media marketer, your goal should be to participate in the conversation, rather than to drive or control the conversation. Social media can be an effective tool to find allies and advocates and communicate with them. It is an opportunity for good customer service. And it provides a method to enhance and promote your brand in an organic and communal way.

 

References

Tuten, T. L., & Solomon, M. R. (2015). Social media marketing. SAGE.

Tuten, T. L., & Solomon, M. R. (2018). Social media marketing. SAGE.