5. Shadow Side of Social Media Marketing: A User’s Perspective

The relatively new phenomenon of social media marketing, accelerated by Web 2.0 broadcasting, promises to have a great potential at reaching out to a wider set of social media audiences. Social media marketing, as a phenomenon, is not static. In fact, its dynamic nature takes into account the relational interaction of the technology, actors, and the situating environmental factors. This chapter, taking a technology-constraints perspective for the social media users, explores the current research on the dark side of social media marketing via a systematic literature review. It also identifies two distinct forms of constraints that apply to this context: intended and unintended.

The findings: a systematic literature review of the subject helped unearth certain core actors (stakeholders) that are interdependent within the sociotechnical system. The topmost category relates to the regulatory bodies and public policy bodies including governments that are trying to enforce social media regulations with a view to providing affordances for businesses and individuals. Intended constraints, for our purpose, are those constraints that can be attributed to an identifiable source or an actor in the social media marketing ecosystem. In other words, the causality of the symptoms can be clearly attributed. Surprisingly, prior research is largely reticent about the dark or shadow side of social media marketing. Grounding this work in a systematic literature review, a framework was developed and typology for better understanding the shadow side of social media marketing identified—specifically, classifying the dark side of social media marketing into two kinds of constraint: intended and unintended.