Strategic Social Media

From Marketing to Social Change

L. Meghan Mahoney, Tang Tang

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118556900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Strategic Social Media is the first textbook to go beyond the marketing plans and how-to guides, and provide an overview of the theories, action plans, and case studies necessary for teaching students and readers about utilizing social media to meet marketing goals.

• Explores the best marketing practices for reaching business goals, while also providing strategies that students/readers can apply to any past, present or future social media platform
• Provides comprehensive treatment of social media in five distinct sections: landscape, messages, marketing and business models, social change, and the future
• Emphasizes social responsibility and ethics, and how this relates to capitalizing on market share
• Highlights marketing strategies grounded in research that explains how practitioners can influence audience behaviour
• Each chapter introduces theory, practice, action plans, and case studies to teach students the power and positive possibilities that social media hold

Part I
Social Media in Convergence

1
Understanding Social Media and Social Behavior Change

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Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Explain how social media has been able to transform audiences into more participatory, globalized and civically engaged users by changing the ways in which they gather, interact with, and disseminate information.
2. Distinguish between audience assumptions in historic linear mass communication models and social media transactional processes.
3. Understand the role of behavior change theory in the marketing process.

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Introduction

Digital natives, or individuals who have been born and raised in a digital world, are often referred to as alien outliers to society (Bauerlein, 2009; Palfrey & Gasser, 2010). In 2009, Professor Mark Bauerlein released the book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don't Trust Anyone Under 30), and posits the millennial generation (i.e., individuals born between 1982 and 2002) as less informed and knowledgeable than previous generations due to their constant use and interaction with digital technologies. The book condemns millennials for their disinterest in reading print books, erosion of basic grammar skills, lack of memory recall ability, and a fascination with distributing mundane status updates through social networking sites.

While Bauerlein's criticisms suggest that technology is detrimental to the future of society, the purpose of this book, Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change, is to offer a different position. Undoubtedly millennials, just like previous generations, are different from their predecessors. They think and process information differently and prefer multiple streams of information with frequent interaction with content (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005; Prensky, 2001). Perhaps one reason why we speak about digital natives as alien and unlike previous generations is due to the unmatched potential that they hold in shaping the world for the better (Palfrey & Gasser, 2010).

The authors of this book believe that technology creates better-informed and more knowledgeable citizens of society, leading towards greater opportunity for positive social change than ever before. Specifically, this book hopes to outline the underlying communication strategies that inspire behavior change in social media audiences, whether that behavior change is intended to inspire business decisions or positive social changes. Additionally, under the guidance of related communication theories, this book aims to show readers how to develop social media marketing messages.

Individuals today have more frequent interaction with information about a wider range of issues, making them more engaged with events happening around the world. Many are concerned about the negative influence social media has on our youngest generations. However, each era of new media comes with a strong and vocal wave of fear and resistance. While it is possible to inspire behavior change through media, new technologies are not inherently good or evil. Take a look at the following items. Which are examples of new media?

1. The Internet during the late twentieth century
2. Magazines during the colonial era
3. Paperback books during World War II
4. All of the above.

The answer is (d) All of the above.

The definition of what new media includes is perpetually changing. To say that one generation's media use is better than another is ill-informed. Most often, individuals fear the unfamiliar and unknown when it comes to technology. With adults spending more than 8.5 hours per day in front of screens (Zackon, 2009), it is only natural to question what type of influence media has on everyday lives. However, this reflection must consider the complicated process of igniting behavior change through media content.

Years of communication research have taught us that the cause-and-effect process is not as simple as previously thought. The media is often identified as the cause for negative behavior, whether it is making us more violent, obese, or over-sexualized members of society. However, the process of audience behavior change is far more complicated than a direct media effects model suggests. It is easier to blankly assume that because person A consumed media B that they were led towards behavior C. These types of causal relationships seem justified, especially when the media message in question is something unfamiliar or scary. However, this type of assumption is sometimes referred to as “hypodermic-needle theory” (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007), and is an outdated notion of how media directly influences behavior through a linear cause-and-effect process. A strong understanding of behavior change research outlined in this chapter will help illustrate this process.

Social media is defined as a group of Internet-based applications built on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). It is right to turn to social media when attempting to inspire behavior change in audiences through media messages. The user-generated profile feature of social media is the closest connection many media producers will ever have to the individual personality of an audience member. Social media does not fundamentally change the ways in which audiences make decisions about their everyday actions, but simply maximizes the opportunity for marketers to reach and interact with consumers. This book therefore investigates how individuals turn to social media as a space to create and recreate personal and perceived identities, thus helping social media marketers understand how social media tools are used by their audiences and how to inspire behavior change through social media content.

Many alternative social media references teach users the specifics about how to use various platforms. They share information about how Facebook status updates are different than Twitter posts. However, the authors of this book believe that it is more useful for marketers to have a strong understanding of how social media is able to inspire human behavior change than it is to know about platform-specific tools. Rather than constantly looking ahead at what is new or trendy in social media, it is more practical to learn about how humans make decisions based on their own life experiences, including media content consumption. Marketers can then use this knowledge to develop social media strategies through whatever social media platform they choose or emerge as the next trendy platform in the future.

Through an understanding of foundational communication theories, one will be able to apply the tools of behavior change to any past, present or future social media platform. It is better to understand the link between media and behavior change than it is to know the differences between platform interfaces. By the end of this book, it should be clear that regardless of your goal as a social media strategist, whether it is for social media marketing, personal social media use, or creating large-scale social change campaigns, the process through which audiences are inspired towards permanent behavior change is the same.

Thus, the authors believe that rather than viewing digital natives as The Dumbest Generation, a bridge must be built between traditional communication theories and social media practitioners. This will help individuals utilize technologies to meet their goals. This chapter aims to discuss how social media has been able to push individuals towards more participatory, globalized, and civically engaged spaces by changing the ways in which users gather and disseminate information (Castells, 2001; Scheufele, 2002; Jenkins, 2006; Levine, 2007). While this chapter provides a substantial overview of communication theories, future chapters will help guide readers towards developing specific social media strategies, and thus illustrating the promising opportunities brought by social media.

Bridging Communication Theories and Social Media Practitioners

This chapter provides a basic communication theoretical framework for individuals looking to advance their career through the effective creation and dissemination of social media messages. One basic definition states that communication is “who says what to whom and with what effect” (Lasswell, 1948; Griffin, 2011). This definition of communication intrinsically links the construct to persuasion. Whether it be the source of the message (who), the content of the message (what) or audience characteristics (whom), the process of communication is all about behavior change (Griffin, 2011). Understanding human behavior is one of the most crucial things that social media communication specialists need to learn before developing successful social media marketing campaigns.

Because this book is interested in constructing social media messages, it will mostly examine the communication process through the mass communication paradigm. Traditional models of mass communication were long thought of as a “one-to-many” model, where one message was crafted to appeal to as many people as possible, and broadcast through a mass medium to reach a large audience. Here, mass communication is able to disseminate a single message multiple times in a much more efficient manner than any other type of communication (Dominick, 2008). Mass media audiences were seen as homogeneous, individually anonymous and geographically dispersed. With a simple click of a button, an advertisement could be broadcast to the masses in print, over the radio or on television. However, just like the other types of communication, scholars and communication specialists quickly learned that this top-down linear model that posits one individual as a sender of a communication message and another as a receiver was not the most effective at persuading audiences.

A more nuanced outlook of the role that audiences play in the mass communication reception process proved necessary. Persuasive communication mod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• PART I SOCIAL MEDIA IN CONVERGENCE
• PART II SOCIAL MEDIA USERS AND MESSAGES
• PART III SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AND BUSINESS MODELS
• PART IV MARKETING FOR SOCIAL GOOD
• PART V SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SOCIAL AND BEHAVIOR CHANGE
• Index
• EULA