Social Media Management

This chapter introduces the role of the Internet and particularly social media in today’s digital economy. The reader gets an overview of the topics covered in the subsequent chapters and of the extent to which these topics relate to the different departments in an organization. Evidence is given that social media are not limited to marketing or information technology (IT), but that a multitude of departments are involved. This multidisciplinary approach of social media constitutes the main thread of the book in order to determine, execute, and evaluate social media strategies that help achieve business objectives and create business value.

Before discussing the multidisciplinary approach of social media in subsequent chapters, this chapter provides the reader with a common understanding. The most important concepts are defined, such as social media, social media management, user-generated content, and Web 2.0. The latter concept is also situated in a broader Internet evolution (until Web 4.0 and beyond), including emerging technologies. It is shown how and to which degree traditional communication models and theories apply to social media and how a social ripple effect can be created. Furthermore, social media tools are classified in social media types. This chapter also reflects on community management, blogging/vlogging, social bookmarking, and gamification. By discussing different characteristics of social media, the reader gets an idea about which social media types are more suited for which purposes or business goals.

In this chapter, the reader will learn that organizations should not use social media as such, just to use social media as a new hype. Instead, social media initiatives should serve social media strategies, which in turn should serve the organization’s strategies. Similarly, business models are underlying social media tools. The chapter shows how social media strategies and corresponding tactics can be derived from the business objectives and how key performance indicators (KPIs) and tactics can be formulated in a SMART way (i.e., as concrete as possible, in order to know what to evaluate). Possible initiatives to execute a social media strategy are covered in the subsequent chapters. While executing a social media strategy, an organization should constantly monitor its initiatives, evaluate whether they pay off, and possibly redirect the strategy. Particularly, social media initiatives do not pay off by merely having a lot of “followers” or many “likes” in social media tools, but by reaching a high return on investment (ROI). Consequently, this chapter also emphasizes the importance of evaluating a social media strategy by means of social actions, business actions (e.g., sales or the number of subscriptions to a newsletter), and ultimately ROI.

This chapter focuses on two possible social media initiatives to execute a social media strategy, namely, online advertising and viral marketing campaigns. The chapter does not intend to elaborate on the general marketing-related aspects of ads and campaigns, but clarifies the elements typical to an online context. Regarding online ads, the chapter particularly explains the different pricing models and the bidding process. Besides tips and trips for starting and monitoring online ads, the reader learns about legislation related to online privacy and cookies for enabling personalized or targeted ads. The problem with online advertising is, however, that an abundance of ads can lead to people who try to avoid ads or who become blind for ads. Therefore, the chapter explains some alternatives as well as how viral campaigns can be a solution to ad avoidance or ad blindness by relying on mouth-to-mouth communication. Also, the rising importance of influencers is discussed. Finally, tips and tricks are given for viral marketing campaigns.

This chapter gives the reader a broader perspective on social media by discussing social customer relationship management (social CRM). Social CRM is the best example of a multidisciplinary social media approach, as it involves almost all departments in the organization. Instead of only contacting people with sales offers, the aim of social CRM is to build strong relationships with Internet users by giving them a positive experience of the organization’s brand, products, and services. Ultimately, social CRM tries to turn an organization’s social media connections into loyal customers and particularly brand advocates who influence others to like the organization (and only indirectly to buy the organization’s products and services). This chapter discusses the use of social CRM and how it can generate business value. As a continuation of the previous chapters, some more advanced monitoring tools are presented for organizations to monitor and evaluate social media actions.

This chapter discusses how an organization can get its website, blog, or other social media pages higher on the (natural or organic) results page of search engines. This topic is highly relevant as Internet users are more likely to visit search results that are at the top of a results page. In order to decide which web pages appear higher on a results page, search engines typically evaluate which web pages are more relevant after applying an indexation mechanism. Such an indexation mechanism will rank web pages by means of so-called spiders. In response, web page owners can try to obtain higher ranks in search engines by applying search engine optimization (SEO) for internal improvements (e.g., on-page or on-site) and external improvements (e.g., link related). Alternatively, the importance of user experience optimization is increasing. This chapter offers the reader some tips and tricks to apply SEO and to evaluate which websites, blogs, or social media pages are more SEO friendly than others are.

This chapter covers the first part of our business intelligence discussion and gives the reader insights into opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Social media are seen as big data in the sense that they provide a massive amount of online reviews and ratings that can be collected and analyzed in order to consider the impact these data may have on organizations. Particularly, several studies have shown that more positive reviews and higher rates for an organization (and its products or services) may lead to a significantly higher number of desired business actions (e.g., higher sales or more subscriptions to an online newsletter). This chapter explains characteristics such as subjectivity and tone in opinions and shows how a sentiment model can be built. The chapter concludes with challenges faced by this research field today.

This chapter covers the second part of our business intelligence discussion and makes the reader learn how organizations can create business value by analyzing social network data. Diverse information about a certain person can be collected from different social media tools and combined into a database to obtain more complete profiles of employees, customers, or prospects (i.e., social engineering). The latter can supplement the social CRM database (see Chap. 5). Particularly, social media may uncover information about what people post, share, or like but also to whom they are connected. By combining or aggregating such information for many individuals in social networks, organizations can start predicting trends, e.g., to improve their targeted marketing (see Chap. 4) or to predict which people are more likely to churn, fraud, resign, etc. Hence, social media are seen as big data in the sense that they can provide massive amounts of real-time data about many Internet users, which can be used to predict someone’s future behavior based on the past behavior of others. This chapter explains how social networks can be built from social media data and introduces concepts such as peer influence and homophily. The chapter concludes with big data challenges to social network data.

This chapter clarifies how social media can be used by employers to recruit and by employees to be recruited. Besides general tips and tricks for e-recruitment, the reader will learn about some specific applications of social media tools that are frequently used worldwide. The main focus is on LinkedIn™, which is a social media tool dedicated to recruiting and professional networking, but other social media tools can also support e-recruitment (e.g., Facebook™, Instagram™, or Twitter™). We also delve into dedicated software systems that support e-recruitment. Furthermore, the chapter reflects on legal and ethical consequences that social media can have on hiring and firing.

This chapter elaborates on crowdfunding, which is an alternative funding mechanism for organizations and entrepreneurs to raise small amounts of money from the crowd as micro-investors (instead of a large amount of money from the bank or a few macro-investors). Although crowdfunding may still concern a loan that needs to be paid off, an increasing number of crowdfunding projects only focus on giving rewards in return. This chapter discusses the history and rise of crowdfunding. The reader gets to know the different types of crowdfunding projects, which are linked to different dedicated crowdfunding platforms. Besides providing general tips and tricks for doing a crowdfunding project and the role of social media, this chapter looks at legal issues and risks that are linked to crowdfunding.

This chapter takes the perspective of legal and ethical issues in social media to complete the multidisciplinary approach of this book. Instead of intending to give legal advice, this chapter encourages the reader to reflect on proper social media use. Previous chapters already looked at how legislation is related to social media. Particularly, the chapter on online ads (Chap. 4) talked about privacy and cookie laws. Furthermore, the chapter on e-recruitment (Chap. 9) discussed some legal practices for organizations not to recruit or to fire someone because of social media posts. The chapter on crowdfunding (Chap. 10) referred to legislation to protect micro-investors. Besides legislation, also ethical concerns have been formulated. For instance, the chapter on SEO mentioned the use of black hat SEO techniques (Chap. 6), and the chapters on business intelligence considered the impact of fake customer reviews (Chap. 7) and privacy concerns for big data analysis (Chap. 8). This chapter supplements the previous chapters by discussing social media ethics from the perspective of organizations, as well as the perspective of individual employees and influencers as social media users. The reader learns about the role of a social media policy, Terms of Service, copyright or intellectual property, a digital afterlife, and password security, among others.

This chapter concludes the book by combining the perspectives of previous chapters in various integration exercises. Diverse insights and knowledge obtained throughout the book are now applied in multidisciplinary case studies, assignments, and brainstorming exercises. The latter are not intended to be comprehensive or to apply the entire book at once. Instead, the reader is encouraged to carefully think through which knowledge and reflections may apply to certain business situations. The purpose of this final chapter is to encourage the reader to critically discuss how specific organizations can take advantage of social media and create business value. Together with the self-tests offered in previous chapters, this chapter illustrates the extent to which the reader meets the book’s learning objectives (as presented in Chap. 1), namely, about (1) proper use, (2) knowledge, (3) strategic insights, (4) critical reasoning, and (5) lifelong learning in the context of social media.