Archive for the ‘social marketing’ tag
Future society II no comments
I was writing in my previous post that we don’t really realize where we are heading, but the change is already here, we are already in this cybersociety. At the London Conference on Cyberspace last Tuesday, Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda emphasised the social benefits of being online. She stressed that it was vital to deal with the 30% of Europeans currently not online. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15544517
In the forward of the book Engines of Creations by K. Eric Drexler, Marvin Minsky says the following: How can we predict where science will take us? [..] It is virtually impossible to predict which alternatives will become technically feasible over any longer period of time. [..] It is equally hard to guess the character of the social changes.
Probably one of the best fortunetellers of today, Manuel Castells, Professor of Sociology at Berkley University, is widely regarded as a leading analyst of the Information Age and the Network Society. In the following blog posts we will try to pick up his main ideas by selectively reading through his famous trilogy.
Castells defines space in The Rise of the Network Society, the first volume of his trilogy, as being the material support of time-sharing social practices. Further he explains by time-sharing social practices I refer to the fact that space brings together those practices that are simultaneous in time. [..] The space of flows is the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows.
- The first layer, the first material support of the space of flows is actually constituted by a circuit of electronic exchanges (micro-electronic based devices, telecommunications, computer processing)
- The second layer is constituted by its nodes and hubs. [..] A “global city” is the production site of the informational global economy
- The third layer refers to the spation organization of the dominant, managerial elites (rather than classes) e.g. Google, Facebook
In the Conclusion chapter of the book, Castells says the new economy is organized around global networks of capital management and information, whose access to technological know-how is at the roots of productivity and competitiveness. [..] Our species has reached the level of knowledge and social organization that will allow us to live in a predominanty social world. It is a beginning of a new existence, and indeed the beginning of a new age, the Information Age.
In Marketing to the Social Web, Larry Weber suggests the following methods for promoting the community that you built around your product:
- doing marketing research by following what users blog or post about your product
- minding the gap between the different ages, income or whatever might differentiate customers and focus on a target
- actually contact and offer incentives to good customers
- use search engine optimization
- promote the URL of your website through traditional or multimedia ads
- increase the benefits of your services by constantly adding new features
Social Marketing compared with traditional Marketing is personalized, more targeted and I think it is more cost effective and efficient.
In the next post, we will take a look at Castells’s second volume of his trilogy, The Power of Identity.
Self and business in social networks no comments
I was considering the two topics – social networks and consciousness from the perspective of Psychology and Marketing. But as I found later the more appropriate fields would be Sociology and Social Marketing.
After the class on Wednesday, one nice colleague boroughed me the book Social Psychology by Brehm, Kassin, Fein with the suggestion that I could also look into Sociology. As I was reading through this book and thinking about the topics, I came across the The Self-Concept which is just another term for self-consciousness. We can describe self-consciousness by looking at the main methods through it is achieved:
- introspection = looking inward at one’s thoughts and feelings
- perceptions of our own behavior = analyzing your own behaviour you can find out how you react in certain situations
- influences of other people = identifying yourself through comparison with others
- cultural perspectives – depending on the origin of the individual he might be an individualist (its values are independence, autonomy, self-reliance) or a collectivist (its values are interdependence, cooperation and social harmony)
So point 3. states that self-consciousness is influenced by others. In the Royal Society presentation called Understanding social and information networks given by Professor Jon Kleinberg: http://royalsociety.tv/rsPlayer.aspx?presentationid=499 the speaker shows the probability of joining a group based on the number of friends already joined:
The web is now a social phenomenon, it isn’t just a place to access and share information, it is a world of its own where people interact, live and change. This is an unprecedented phenomenon in human history.
And as the world changes, the way of doing business also shifts from the traditional marketing techniques to a more valuable, customized approach. A suitable quote from Socialnomics by Erik Qualman would be the following:
Marketer’s Philosophy Yesterday
- It’s all about the sex and sizzle of the message and brand imagery
- It’s all about the message; good marketers can sell anything
- We know what is right for the customer – we are doing the customer a service because they really don’t know what they want
Marketer’s Philosophy Today
- It’s important to listen and respond to customer needs
- It’s all about the product; it’s necessary to in constant communication with all the other departments
- We never know what is exactly right for the customer; that is why we are constantly asking and making adjustments
The topics that I touched in this post (and will in the next ones) were the self-concept and how it relates to the social-self, new ways of doing marketing taking into account this new type of individual. Until the next post, I will
- have a look into Sociology to understand the driving forces of social networks
- read more from the book Socialnomics because it describes how social media transforms the way we live and do business (this is actually the book subtitle)
- look into more social marketing books to find out the methods of doing business in this brave new world