Interacting with Your Customers
Now that we've learned a little about e-business and e-commerce, read about the importance of interacting with customers paying particular attention to the section about social media marketing. You'll better understand why businesses are using social media to promote their products and what their goals may be.
The main challenge of social media marketing is that it can be very time consuming. It takes determination and resources to succeed. Small companies often lack the staff to initiate and manage social media marketing campaigns. Even large companies can find the management of media marketing initiates overwhelming. A recent study of 1,700 chief marketing officers indicates that many are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of customer data available on social sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. This is not surprising given that Facebook has more than eight hundred million active users, and two hundred million tweets are sent each day. The marketing officers recognize the potential value of this data but are not capable of using it. A chief marketing officer in the survey described the situation as follows: "The perfect solution is to serve each consumer individually. The problem? There are 7 billion of them". In spite of these limitations, 82 percent of those surveyed plan to increase their use of social media marketing over the next 3 to 5 years. To understand what real-time information is telling them, companies will use analytics software, which is capable of analyzing unstructured data. This software is being developed by technology companies, such as IBM, and advertising agencies.
The bottom line: what is clear is that marketing, and particularly advertising, has changed forever. As Simon Pestridge, Nike's global director of marketing for Greater China, said about Nike's marketing strategy, "We don't do advertising any more. We just do cool stuff…but that's just the way it is. Advertising is all about achieving awareness, and we no longer need awareness. We need to become part of people's lives and digital allows us to do that".