Social Media Marketing: Word of Mouth

This is the eight session in this program on digital marketing and we are now going to discuss social media
marketing. Social media marketing is a form of Internet marketing utilizing social network sites as marketing
tools and thereby gaining tropics, brand exposure and interaction with customers through social media. Now,
like I had discussed with you in an earlier class about how social media is where customers interact with other
customers predominantly, so these are platforms where customers are coming so that they can now discuss their
everyday life with other customers and these social networks are in some way used by marketers to gather more
customers, to make sure that the engagement levels of customers can be kept at a very high level, to make sure
that they can have greater brand exposure and to also understand how they can create a narrative in the
customer's mind, which is influential to them.

In social media platforms or on social media, you basically have an opportunity to use paid, owned and earned
media approaches. Say for example, there are a lot of advertisements that are serviced on Facebook, LinkedIn
and other platforms. There are a lot of influencer programs done on different platforms, all of which become
part of the paid media platform or paid media approaches of using social media. There are a lot of companies
which have their own Facebook communities, their own Twitter accounts and their own LinkedIn pages where
they might be using all of this to engage customers in a better way, to make sure that they can reach out to the
customers with product promotions, to make sure they can now hire a lot of employees who can come and work
for them and for a varied number of other purposes. All of these digital assets, in regard with the Facebook
page, Twitter accounts or LinkedIn pages, etc, or applications which are social networking applications in
nature, you're talking about owned media, which is completely owned and managed by the organization itself.

And then there are a lot of earned media that you generate on social media. This is the most critical element of
social media marketing wherein customers now start talking about different things including brands and
products that you're offering to the market. And this becomes a lot of very important earned media or very
important word of mouth that customers are now providing as either positive word of mouth, which is
extremely relevant for other customers to know about your product and buy your product, or negative word of
mouth that can be used as critical feedback about your products and services. So irrespective of the kind of
platforms that you are in, you can now work around with the paid, owned and earned media approaches. We'll
discuss predominantly about the owned and earned media in today's session. And we'll come to the paid media
in subsequent sessions.

Now before we delve deeper into social media and how the marketer can use social media platforms, there are
different types of social media platforms and we need to understand all of these different types of social media
platforms because that is what will give us an overview of the entire clutter that is there with respect to social
media out there. You have platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and many others
which are all social in nature, which are all categorized as social networks, which can all be used by the
marketer in different ways. But they have distinct features and distinct characteristics to each of them.

So basically there are four ways in which you can classify social networking sites and social networking
platforms. These can be social communities, social publishing sites, social entertainment providers or social
commerce sites.

The social community, as the term refers, is a platform which basically focuses on creating and managing
communities of people. So these are places where people come so that they can interact with one another. Social
networks are not something that has taken birth in the internet space. Social networks have always been there,
but the changes that have happened are with respect to the scale and the reach of social networks. Earlier, a
social network would have been a small group of friends who used to work together or who used to come
together to play cricket or football in the evening. They would discuss about different products, they would
discuss about different people. They would discuss about different scenarios that are going on in this society.

Today all of this has been transformed into the social networking space in the digital world because of which
now you have a greater reach, more number of people who are talking to each other, much faster
communication that is happening, no restriction of geographical limits. You can talk to somebody who is sitting
in the United States very easily on Facebook. So such kinds of communities always used to exist. And even
today there are a lot of platforms and predominantly customers spend time on social networks because they
want to engage with this community. So you basically want to socialize, you want to converse with other
people, you want to share a lot of things, content with respect to what you are doing, what is happening in your
life so that others can see and others can create an image of what kind of person you are. So the first and most
important type of social networks that you see are social communities.

Then there are social publishing sites. Now these social publishing sites are where a lot of content is generated
and published. So this is where we talk about a lot of blogs that are out there, a lot of places where user
generated content can be brought about. This could be blogs which are oriented in a commercial nature where
people come and talk about certain activities or certain elements of their everyday expertise, wherein they also
talk about certain products which are there and act as affiliates to more people knowing about such products. It
could be more of people who are coming out and sharing their general interest in different elements of life. So
social publishing is where people can create content and share all of this content so that they can let the world
know what kind of interests they have.
Say for example, if I'm somebody who's interested in photography, I might have a blog that talks about my
interest in photography, my understanding of how photography equipment works, or a detailed blog about my
experiences of going on a photo walk across the city of Lucknow. It's a beautiful city. There are a lot of ancient
places, a lot of monuments, which I can take pictures of and publish on the social space. And when I have all of
this rich content, there might be a lot of people who will come to this social publishing platform, which could be
a blog or which could be any kind of an editorial and they'll start talking about it. They will converse about it. A
lot of this content will then be transferred into other social media applications. People will share all of this
content and it will be shared very often with a lot of other people, so it could end up being more of a
conversation topic, etc. But predominantly a lot of platforms are purely for publishing.

There are also platforms which are for social entertainment. Say for example, there are a lot of platforms that
provide games, videos, movies and things like that. IMDB is a good example of a social entertainment platform
where there are movies that are reviewed by people. They talk about different genres of movies. They talk about
different elements of what are interesting in a movie and what are not interesting in a movie. There are reviews
that are provided. So every time customers are interested in watching movies, they can go to IMDB to
understand which movie to watch. A similar case is with YouTube where you have a lot of content that is video
content. A lot of this content is used for entertainment. People watch a lot of this content so that now they can
spend time and find some entertaining value from this content. It's also extremely social in nature.

And finally you have social commerce applications or collaboration applications. One of the most important
applications that I can remember is Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a place where a lot of people come together, a lot
of people who manage and create content about different elements. It is people like you and me who collaborate
together to create the content that is available on Wikipedia. Quora is another platform where people can now
come and talk about or ask questions and gather information about different elements or different problems that
they're facing or if they want to gather information about a specific place or a specific product or a specific
service. All of this information can be gathered from platforms like Quora, Wikipedia etc. All of these are
collaborative platforms.

You also have a lot of commerce that happens on social media. Recently you would have seen Facebook has
created a marketplace where you can now interact with other customers who are trying to sell products. So,
social commerce is also happening. You would have seen that a lot of local businesses have business pages on
Facebook wherein you can go to these business pages, you can understand what kind of expertise they have.
They can also be reached by call to action buttons on these pages. So a lot of commerce also happens on social
media.
Social media and social platforms are also used as an extremely important area wherein you are gathering
feedback from customers, understanding what the customer is looking for. So a lot of customer relationship
management also happens through social networks. Customers can come to your Facebook page and write
about a grievance that they had. Say for example, if you are a destination website or if you are a person who is
having hotels in a city of Goa, then probably customers who have visited your hotel, visited your property can
now take pictures and share their experiences on your social platform, which becomes content for other
customers to see. So all of this will generate more sales, generate more money for you and generate more
business for you. So hence, again social media can be now used as a commerce application.

So social community, social publishing, social entertainment and social commerce or collaboration are the
different kinds of platforms that you see. So if you take all the social networking platforms out there, which you
have seen, which you are part of, you can basically see that all of them can be classified as predominantly one
of these platforms. You might also find that these platforms might be a hybrid of any of these. There might be
platforms which basically associate with two of these elements. Say for example, if we take Facebook,
Facebook can be a social community as well as a lot of people use content on Facebook for entertainment as
well. So, there can be a mix of different elements here which the customers can use. So these are about social
media platforms in general. Now we'll discuss a little bit about why social media is extremely important to
marketers.

In one of the previous classes I had discussed about the concept of word of mouth. Now word of mouth is any
kind of informal consumer to consumer interaction about a brand, a product or service or any of these elements
which is not influenced by the marketer. So the key elements of word of mouth are that it is informal in nature,
it is customer to customer in nature and it is not influenced by the marketer. These elements give word of mouth
a lot of distinct advantages as compared to the traditional format of communication like advertising. So if you
take advertising on one side and if you take word of mouth on the other, there are distinct advantages on word
of mouth side which we need to understand.

The first of these things is that word of mouth is often informal and credible. Advertisement, on the other hand,
is less in credibility or lacks credibility and in many cases is more formal because it involves a set of production
activities, it involves certain kinds of planning, there is a channel that is being used etc.

Now, why is it important to know that word of mouth is more credible or how is word of mouth more credible?
Word of mouth is more credible because like I defined earlier, word of mouth is any informal consumer to
consumer interaction that is not controlled by the marketer. The reason that it is not controlled by the marketer
now makes the customer who is the recipient of such word of mouth realize and feel that this is not somebody
else who is trying to motivate me, incentivize me to now go ahead and make the purchase.
On the other hand, when we talk about advertising, I always will have it in my mind that the marketer is trying
to convince me so that he can increase his revenue. He can make me go and buy the product and thereby
increase sales for the company. So hence, word of mouth has higher credibility associated to it as compared to
advertising. It is more informal in nature.

One major problem with word of mouth before the advent of Internet was the fact that word of mouth could not
reach to a lot of people. The word of mouth that was generated was within small social networks. So if I had
gone and watched a movie, then I would come back and talk about this movie to three or four of my friends.
And these three or four of my friends, who are sitting in front of me at my house or in a coffee shop would
listen to this conversation, would make some perceptions about the movie that I watched, good or bad, and then
probably they would forget it very fast or they would probably not be able to tell it to other people. The reach
was very limited because I could only go and talk to three or four people at a time. If I had seen a movie, which
was extremely important, I would talk to a set of 10 groups about the movie that would again still talk about say
10 groups of three or four people. So the reach at max was 30-40 people. Unless I was somebody who was
extremely influential, who can talk on a podium and use a megaphone to shout out to the entire world, which
was not the case earlier. But today with the advent of digital tools and with the advent of the Internet and social
networks, as we know, it has become much easier for me to reach out to thousands and millions of people.

Now consider that you watch a movie today and you have a very great experience from watching that movie.
You go to Facebook, write this down for hundreds and thousands of your Facebook friends to see. If you're
somebody who is on Twitter and if you have thousands of followers on Twitter, every tweet that you're going to
write is now going to be seen by at least a thousand people. Every time that you have such kind of content
written down on social media platforms, there are other friends of yours, other followers of yours who will
come and now interact with the content. Say for example, one of your friends comes and hits a like button. This
content is now visible at least theoretically to all the friends that are on his or her friend list. If somebody re-
tweets your tweet, it is now visible to a larger set of people. So the reach has exponentially increased as
compared to word of mouth in the traditional form. So because word of mouth is so critical and because the
Internet and social networks, as we understand today, provide a greater reach for all of this content, it has
become very important for you to make sure that customers can be motivated to write more about your products
and your services.

Another problem is that earlier word of mouth was extremely spontaneous. So you would have somebody talk
about your brand, people who would have heard about this opinion of the customer and over time they would
have only had this limited to themselves. They will not have been able to archive it in some way so that other
customers can see. But with Internet and with the reach that Internet has, it also has the ability to archive all of
this information. So every time you're writing something down on social media or you're writing something
down on an e-commerce site as a review to a product, all of this is stored forever. All of this is stored for all
customers in future to come and read through. So that is why on e-commerce platforms you would have seen
that reviews are becoming extremely important. There are a lot of customers who are now seeing reviews first
and then deciding whether or not to buy the product.

So that is why reviews and the kind of content that is provided on social networks are extremely important in
their ability to be archived and in their ability to be shown to other people. Interactivity is extremely high. If a
customer talks about your product, there are other customers who can now come and interact with such
products. Say for example, you are a manufacturer of an organic fruit juice. Now a customer who is buying your
product has gone to Facebook and being so happy with your product that they shared that this is a great product.
There are other customers who can instantaneously come and ask this customer, “Where can I go and buy this?”
This customer can immediately give information that you can go to store ABC in city or in location and buy it
from there. Or a link to the e-commerce platform can be provided wherein customers can order this product and
get it delivered to the house. So interactivity is extremely great.

If you had a grievance, if you had a complaint about the certain service that is being provided to you. Say if
your telecom service provider is not been doing a great job, you can immediately go to their website or their
platform or their page on social networks and you can write about it. They can immediately talk to you. So the
interactivity is quite high.

The next element is that many times social networking sites and word of mouth is voluntary in nature.
Customers want to talk to other customers. Customers want to understand the experience of other customers. So
the level of intrusiveness of content on social networks and content, which is word of mouth, is much limited or
much lower as compared to advertising messages. Many times you would have seen that advertisements are
very annoying. Advertisements can become very intrusive in nature.

Many times advertisers increase the frequency of advertisements to a level that it becomes very difficult for you
to keep seeing these advertisements again and again and you don't necessarily want to see this advertisement.
So many a times you start creating an aversive approach to such advertisement. On the contrary, when it's word
of mouth, such content is consumed voluntarily by customers. So they don't generally feel very intrusive or it is
not as intrusive as advertisements. The downside in many cases is that you don't have a lot of control with
respect to word of mouth. In advertising, on the other hand, you could decide what the message is. You could
create the advertisement by using a celebrity or by using some kind of a person who is extremely well known.
And then the advertisement message can be put out there. You can decide what frequency to use and thereby
you can ensure that you have all the content of what is being told about the brand.
On the other side, on social networking platforms, you have very limited control with regard to the word of
mouth. And because this limited control exists, there is a lot of risk that brands have to take. Say for example,
there can be a negative word of mouth that can be spread very fast, like wildfire and which can tarnish the
reputation of the brand significantly. So such kinds of downsides also exist with respect to word of mouth. But
word of mouth is extremely important when it comes to transforming customers, when it comes to actually
converting customers to now come and make a purchase decision and buy your products.

So word of mouth has a lot of advantages. It also has certain limitations. Advantages include credibility, the
relevance to customers, the fact that it is voluntary in nature, the fact that with social media you have a reach
that is unparalleled, the fact that it can all be archived and people can read all of these reviews and understand
what is out there and what is not. The costs associated with word of mouth are not significantly high because
many times if these campaigns are not influencer campaigns or these campaigns are not advertising campaigns,
and if all of this content is organically generated, then you don't end up paying anything to customers. So hence
the cost associated is quite low. So all of these differences as compared to advertising makes word of mouth and
makes this whole social media platform extremely relevant to the marketers.

Now let's discuss briefly about why people share word of mouth. We have already discussed about the
importance of word of mouth, but why is that people share word of mouth. I'm talking from a research that has
come out from people who work on this area. There are four basic reasons why people share word of mouth and
these include impression management, emotional regulation, information acquisition and social bonding. These
are the four particular reasons because of which customers on social media will be sharing a lot of word of
mouth.

Now impression management is to do with the fact that customers are trying to signal what their identity is,
what their interests are and also are trying to enhance their own self image in the network that they are
connected to. Say for example, you would have known that many a times when consumers purchase products,
or when consumers are visiting exotic locations, they want to let this be known to other people in their network
because by doing so now they are able to tell others what their interests are, what their experiences are, what
kind of places do they visit. So this is where you would have seen many people who are traveling would be
checking into different airports. If you are in an exotic location, like if you're going to Mauritius, you might be
sharing pictures about Mauritius. So it is one way of enhancing your own self image and it is also to signal what
kind of identity you want to carry. You would have seen many people who are interested in biking or many
people who are interested in hiking or trekking would be sharing all of these things because this is a way in
which they're creating an image about themselves and signaling to others as to what their interests are, what
their opinions are, what kind of identity they have. And also by doing so they are creating an image of
themselves which they might or might not be in real life. So that is why you would have seen many people like
to show off on social media, etc. So impression management is the first reason why people share word of
mouth.

The second reason why people share word of mouth is for emotional regulation. Now many times it is important
to understand that as human beings we have a requirement to be at a very stable place. We don't want to have
extreme emotions. It'd be very difficult if we are always angry or it is very difficult if we are always sad. So
many a times we have a mechanism wherein we want to regulate our emotions and we want to come back to a
stable place. This is also known as Homeostatis. So, in order to do so, in order to manage our own emotions, we
end up sharing a lot of things on the social space or we try to talk to a lot of other people. In many cases where
there is some sort of unfairness that has happened or some sort of a situation where I have been left out on
myself, I would feel that I need to generate social support. Say for example if I had been consuming a product
and the service provider or the manufacturer of the product hasn't been treating me fairly. I have been trying to
reach out to the customer care departments. I've been trying to ask them for a replacement of the product. None
of this works. I need to gather social support so that I can now get my due fairness from the service provider or
from the manufacturer, and hence to generate social support, I might get on social media and share a lot of these
things.

Another important element which is extremely important is to understand that many times you don't like all the
people on social media. So you won't vent out your emotions. You are extremely angry at the service provider
who basically didn't provide the kind of offerings that they had promised you to provide. So you want to vent
out this emotion, vent out this anger against the manufacturer or vent out this anger against the service provider.
So venting of all this emotion is also something that is extremely relevant.

Customers also engage in social media and share a lot of word of mouth because they want to now make sense
of what is happening. Say for example, when you are consuming a product which has been claiming to have
features which are exceptional, which are out of the ordinary and you really don't know whether to believe it or
not, you might want to share all of this information with others and to gather their feedback and thereby make
sense of whether or not to believe all of this information. Many a times you would have seen that there are
rumors that are there in the marketplace and such rumors require you to now gather more information to make
sense of what is happening. So hence because of this reason also you might be sharing word of mouth out there.

There's a lot of dissonance that customers feel. One very simple example is that many times you are involved in
making key decisions and every time you make a key decision you go through a lot of cognitive processing of
information. You would have really thought about what are the different products out there? What are the
attributes that are important to you? How can I arrive at a product choice which is the best for me? But
immediately after buying the product, you would have observed that many a times you start questioning
whether the decision was the right decision or not. You would have started thinking that, oh no, this mobile
phone might not have been as good as the other mobile phone. And you would start questioning your own
decision and you would have a state of unease with respect to the decision that you have made. So this kind of
cognitive dissonance is very common in purchase situations and to reduce such cognitive dissonance, customers
often engage in conversations with others, wherein you'd be telling your friend that I purchased this mobile
phone, what do you think? I purchased this kind of a bike. What do you think? I purchased this camera. What
do you think? Thereby you try to gather a lot of feedback from others, thereby trying to validate that your
decision was not wrong. And hence reducing dissonance is also an important element of how customers share
word of mouth to manage their emotions or for emotional regulation. So, all of these are different elements that
customers use to manage their emotions. So, emotional regulation is a very critical reason why customers share
word of mouth.

Another very obvious reason why customers share word of mouth is because they want to gather a lot of
information. Not all purchase decisions are easy to make. Many times there is little amount of information that
you know about the product. Say for example, if you want to buy a telescope because you want to create a new
hobby of watching stars, but you really don't know what kind of telescopes are there in the market. You really
don't know what kind of lenses are going into different telescopes. You don't know what are the different
specifications that you need to look for. So hence, because lack of expertise is one critical problem when you're
buying a lot of things, you want to gather information. Telescopes are not always very cheap. There might be
telescopes which might be costing upwards of a lakh of rupees. So you have a lot of risk in making a wrong
choice. If you make a wrong choice, the chances that you will have to end up having a bad telescope is very
high. So the risk is high. So hence here again, you can't make the decision on your own or you can't make the
decision by just looking into online sources. So you might want to gather a lot of information from people who
have an expertise in telescopes and in this product category or in whichever product category that you're trying
to purchase. So hence to know more about the products, to gather more information, you might want to now talk
to people and thereby you might end up sharing a lot of word of mouth. So that is sharing of word of mouth for
information acquisition. So this is basically about seeking advice or resolving problems, etc. You might want to
talk to people.

And finally, social networks are all about social bonding. So hence you will talk to people to reinforce shared
views, to have friendships, to build relationships, and to manage all of these relationships. So the four reasons
why customers share word of mouth are: emotional regulation, information acquisition, social bonding and
impression management, which is what we discussed about creating self image and other things.

Now the next element is to understand what kind of content is generally shared. Customers generally share
content which is entertaining in nature. You would have seen on your Facebook wall. There is a lot of
entertaining information out there and this is one reason why it is very difficult for us to stay out of Facebook
because the content is so enriching and so entertaining. So, entertaining things are shared oftentimes. Useful
information; information that you feel or customers feel, is going to be useful for others, is shared because now
you want to be the person who is sharing useful information, who has the knowledge that others in the group
don't have.

Now let’s talk about self-concept relevant things. We discussed about how impression management is one
activity. So many people share things that are very close to who they are, very close to what their interests are.
When you're purchasing things that many people in your community or many people in your network are unable
to consume, say for example, if you're in a group of people where people generally consume, say 10,000 or
15,000 or 20,000 rupees worth of mobile phones, and suddenly there is one member of the group who has
purchased the iPhone X, which costs a lakh rupees. Now suddenly this becomes a high status good. And
because you have consumed this good, the status can also be transferred to this customer. So hence, such
content is shared about high status goods.

Unique and new things are shared very often. You would have seen that many of the viral campaigns out there,
many of the messages that become viral later on are all about unique and new things. So novelty is something
that catches a lot of attention and hence it is shared very often. Things that are common to a lot of people are
shared on social media. You might all be studying in different colleges. News about a certain college or a
competing college might be shared among the group of people or students because it is common and will
generally be accepted by a lot of people.

Things which are very arousing in nature, things that put people in an excited mode or things that put people in
a very distressed mode, all of such content, which is polarized in valence or which is very extreme in emotional
valence, will also be shared very often. So, all of these different elements are what consumers share on social
media.

In this module we basically have looked into what are the different platforms of social media that are out there.
What is the importance of word of mouth? How word of mouth is different from advertising? What kind of
content is generally shared by people? Why do people share all of this content? All of these were elements that
we discussed in this module. In the coming module, we will now come specifically about the role of the
marketer and why social media is so critical to the activities that the marketer does.