Since customer-managed relationships became very popular, many large and small businesses have engaged in social media marketing strategy. Large organization such as Dell and Dunkin’ Donuts has created Twitter accounts to establish deep relationships with their current and potential customers.
Social media enables organizations to conduct many marketing strategies simultaneously. Companies can conduct survey about companies and their products. Also, they put advertisement and movie on site. Public relationship is one of the most important factors to create or maintain “perceived mutual beneficial exchange relationship.”
It is obvious that there are many benefits through social media:
· Cost effective
· Close and deep relationships with current and potential customers
· More traffic to companies website
Although companies must take these advantages, they should not ignore some negative effects. I think that one of the most important issues is customer empowerment. Though social media, customers have been participating in everything such as nature of products, design, as well as pricing. When current and potential customers involve in companies’ marketing strategy, those customer tend to expect very high quality and customized products but low price. Failure to meet these high customers’ expectation hurts companies’ images. Companies have been losing a control, and this issue will affects differently to small business and large companies.
Whether small companies succeed or fail depend on how small businesses control these dissatisfied customers who have strong power ever before.
One of the most important issues is criticism and gossip. These comments negatively affect companies’ reputation, and it is very hard to control these issues for small business. Since large organization have already established strong brand image, people who already have positive image about companies tend to ignore these negative information. However, people tend to heavily rely on negative information about small business because of weak brand awareness.
Social media marketing cannot be separated from word-of-mouth marketing.
“Peer recommendations influence business buyers’ decisions more than any other form of advertising. Some 90% of buyers trust peer reviews and 70% trust online reviews, according to the American Marketing Association. Meanwhile, only 15% of buyers say they trust traditional advertising.”
Word-of-mouth information spreads very fast in collective culture such as Japan. Surprisingly, word-of-mouth information spread much faster than information on the Internet.
In addition, here is new form “Web-Word-of-Mouth”
How can small business control current and potential customers and prevent the spread of negative information? It is possible to omit all negative information and restrict dissatisfied consumers?
So, my suggestion is that companies must establish strong brand image before they go into social media. Although low cost and easy accesses attract small businesses, they won’t be able to control empowered customers without strong brand awareness.
Social media marketing is new and very complicated strategy. In today dynamic environment, many people use social network with different purpose, and these purpose have been changing over time. Therefore, Companies must understand how social media works.
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