The benefits and dangers of social media

Most articles are full of new media and mostly focus on the opportunities and
benefits. Besides the benefits of social media, we will also focus on the dangers
of social media. Each will be accompanied by a case. First we will focus on the
benefits and exemplify this by the case of TMF. After that we will go on with the
dangers of social media and hereby we use the case of Skittles and Burger King.

By doing this we provided more background information and therefore give

more depth to the cases. The four articles can be read separate, but they all are
connected to each other.

Hope you’ll enjoy reading it!

Judith Al, Charlotte Grootscholten,

Fay Tulling, Alexandra van der Vloed
& Kirsten van Wijk

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles

Economic benefits of social media

“Networked, Shared, Open”. As we have seen before, social media has a lot of
social opportunities. But if we look at an economic level we don’t have a lot of
information yet. What kind of economic benefits does social media provide and
how can a company, such as BNN, respond to this economic advantages?

Community management has become the starting point for web marketing.
This is not because the advertising and media industries just want us all to play
nice and have lots of warm friendships, it is because they are seeking, in a
crowded transient marketplace characterized by a nomadic audience, to create
brand engagement. (Lister et al 2009: 172,173)

As we can see in this result from a survey MENG group released in November
2008; customer engagement is the biggest benefit a company can get from using
social media in their marketing matrix. This is not very surprising because
marketing on social media level is all about sharing, informing and entertaining
influential audiences, and get the influential audiences on that level that they are
recommending a brand to their friends and family. This recommendations are
unaffordable for a company, because on social media level the opinion of the
audiences counts even more than advertisements in print media or on television.

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles

 Even though according to Lister et al, building a good relation with customers is
an effective way for marketers to promote a company. The more customers are
engaged with your product, the more they will stick to the company and the
more a relation between company and customer will arise. Costumer
engagement is also good to build up a long term relationship with your
costumers. People can feel connected with your company, because of the
personal approach costumers engagement is relying on. Traditional media as TV,
gives us little possibility for a personal approach. By using customers
engagement, audiences can connect with a company and tell them their story
and also have the feeling that they get a response. Instead of a passive audience,
there is a conversation between sender and receiver (Croteau & Hoynes, 2003:
303).

However we can’t say much about the output in terms of money, for a
marketing campaign on a social media level. We know that it is low cost (in terms
of money) to build up a marketing strategy for social media, but the efforts you
need to invest to built and specially remain your relationship with customers and
audiences is very high (on productivity level). As a marketer in social media and
costumers engagement, you constantly need to work on your ‘relationship’ with
your audiences and you cannot afford to make a mistake. There is one long tail
these days and therefore so many niches people can get there information from,
one relational mistake with your audience can be fatal for the relationship
between the costumer and your company (Lister et al 2009: 197-199). A mistake
is very difficult to repair, your relationship could be damaged for good. Because
of the many niches, your customers can get there information somewhere else.
Therefore ‘open ‘communication with customers is very important to build up a
strong and trustworthy relationship that will last for a long time.

Social Media and TV, the upside: “Kijk dit

nou”

In TV land there are not a lot of good examples of

TV stations that are integrating social media into
their programs, but using social media as part of
your marketing strategy is, if possible, even more rare. As we have highlighted in
our presentation there is a good example of this though. This is a Dutch TV
station that has successfully integrated social media into their programs and

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles

lately even in their strategy. This is the music channel TMF, part of the bigger
music station MTV Networks.

Long before the great success of social media as we know it nowadays, like
Facebook and Twitter, TMF was trying to use social media to enrich their formula,
which was basically a small and simple version of the now very popular social
networks. TMF has a division Digital Media, that is constantly trying to improve
their strategies of social media-usage. While their efforts in the past has proven
to be very unprofitable and inefficient, they recently hired marketing
professionals to define a new media strategy. The main target is extending the
engagement of their target group and making them familiar and interact with the
content of TMF. They are trying to achieve this through profiles on Hyves, Twitter
and an interactive SMS-tool. In the end it’s their goal to get rid of the drastic
separation between TV and online content.()(Rijnders, 2009).

As I said before, their main target is engagement of the target group with the
brand TMF. They try to achieve this by bringing the brand under the attention of
the target group at every level possible. They use media as Hyves, Twitter and
cross media programs like ‘Kijk dit nou’. Everyday a group of 12 people is trying
to accomplish this goal with a small budget. While this all seems a success story,
there is a downside to this. The chief of the Digital Media division admits that it is
very hard to see if your strategy is working and even harder to make profit of it.
Their main income at this moment comes from advertisement, which are
attracted by the strong and clear vision of the profile of their target group of
TMF.(Rijnders, 2009).

The dangers of social media

At first sight it seems that social media has not so much to do with economics.
If one takes a closer look, a lot of consequences in terms of economics will
appear. There are many economical dangers involved with Social Media and an
interesting question for example, would be how the capital investment that is
required to develop communications technology, and therefore Social Media, can
be controlled (Lister et al. 2009: 171). The danger we will focus on in this article
is brand damaging through social media.

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles

 Social media is growing every day due to new technological developments. It
are these technological developments that contribute to the social media in
terms of initiatives and features that were not possible before. As we will discuss
further on in this article by using examples like Skittles and Burger King, we see
that social media create a whole new concept of interactivity and networking.
Social media can actually bring life to a brand or product, however it
unfortunately can also damage a brand completely. Social media gives power to
the people, in other words: the consumers of the brand or product in specific.
Companies lose control over their image and identity and eventually have to deal
with great economic problems.

Social media, the downside: “Delete 10 of your friends on face book and
get a free whopper”

New media technologies allow companies and people to move towards certain
niche populations in the long tail (Lister et al. 2009: 107). In this way, these new
initiatives can be quite profitable. Or it can completely backfire.

In last week’s Pecha Kucha presentation we mentioned the Skittles example.

We mentioned the ‘extreme social makeover’ at the Skittles homepage in March
2009. Skittles transformed their homepage into an overlay of possibilities for the
visitor to post comments through links on Twitter and other ‘social’ possibilities
as Facebook and Hyves.

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles

 By providing the people with a certain power, Skittles is trying to create a direct
connection with their customers, whether this is positive or not, is yet to be
determined. People started posting all kinds of messages on the Skittles
homepage. Positive and negative comments were placed because they were
given ‘the power’ to do so. Comments such as “Hey mom, I’m on skittles and
‘what the fuck” till “OMG! Someone hacked skittles.com” were posted on the
homepage of the website. But the most surprising comment did not originate
from the customers but from Skittles itself.

“Just a heads up: Any stuff beyond the Skittles.com page is actually another site
and not in our control. This panel may be hovering over the page, but SKITTLES®
isn’t responsible for what other people post and say on these sites. Click the box
below to acknowledge that you know SKITTLES® isn’t responsible for that stuff.”

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles

 The problem is, that ‘stuff’ is on the homepage of skittles and people are not
crazy, they can actually see this! Skittles eventually was forced to change their
homepage because of all the bad jokes and crazy messages. The brand
experienced a massive negative
publicity and that is extremely
difficult to rebuild.

Another example is the Burger

King viral. In March this year Burger
King launched the ‘whopper sacrifice’
campaign on face book. With the
slogan ‘friendship is strong, but
whopper is stronger’ this campaign
motivated face book users to delete
ten of their friends in order to get a
free whopper. This campaign also
caused quite a few negative
publicity. The campaign was labelled
as obnoxious and was eventually
forced down by face book.

So, as we can see social media provides brand new possibilities to

communicate with their target group and build a relationship. But giving the
power to consumer, can also cause an economic downside. We need to keep this
in mind. Companies are trying to move towards a huge number of niche
populations in the tail (Lister et al. 2009: 197). Producers keep trying to sustain
that one big ‘hit’ and obtain the maximum profit.

Thankfully we all know that you can learn from your mistakes!

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles

Sources

Books

Lister, M. Dovey, J. Giddings, S. Grant, I. Kelly, K. New Media, (2009) a critical

introduction. London & New York: Routledge second edition.

Internet

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com
Key words: 2009, skittles-social-media-campaign
Geraadpleegd op: 16 december 2009

http://www.coldfusioning.com
Key words: 2009, Skittles-Forced-To-Change-Website
Geraadpleegd op 16 december 2009

http://joyfleur.wordpress.com
Keywords: new-media, burger-king
Geraadpleegd op 16 december 2009

http://www.emerce.nl/nieuws.jsp?id=2987843
Rijnders, R. (2009, Oktober 23). Media/Marketing - Technologie.
Opgeroepen op December 15, 2009, van Emerce

http://www.mediaembassy.nl/case_5.php
Social Media Strategie TMF. (sd).
Opgeroepen op December 14, 2009, van Media Embassy - online marketing
innovators

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles

Assignment TSCI week 6: 4 short articles