Module 1: Foundations

Module 1 - Foundations Introduction

• Module 1 is the foundational section, building concepts for adapting to market conditions and running successful social media marketing campaigns.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) Landscape

• Bu er’s 2019 State of Social Report:

  • Only 29% of businesses had e ective social media marketing programs.

  • 90% of companies surveyed claimed social media is important.

  • Companies recognize the importance of social media but are unsure of what to do.

  • Indicates the need for skilled social media marketing professionals to ensure a return on investment.

Social Media Career Outlook

• Job Market Growth: Social media manager positions are now common in most organizations.

• Salary Expectations:

  • Starting salary around $40,000.

  • Experienced directors can earn $70,000+.

  • Specialists and advertising professionals can command $50–$150+ per hour.

• Responsibilities:

  • Community management

  • Advertising and scheduling

  • Responding to messages and customer service

  • Curating content

• Skills: Finance, advertising, editing, copywriting, video production, and graphic design are helpful.

• Content Strategy:

  • Variety of content (images, videos, GIFs, memes, eBooks, promotions, and curated content) is essential.

  • Creating a powerful visual brand across all social channels is crucial.

• Continuous Learning: Keeping current with new platforms, functions, and styles is important for a social media career.

Hello Web 2.0 and the Birth of Social Media

• New Terminology: Terms like “streaming,” “catfish,” “viral,” “hashtag,” “selfie,” “DM,” “friend me,” and “tag” have become commonplace.

• Web 2.0 Definition:

  • Indicates the innovation of social media versus the World Wide Web (WWW).

  • Technology developers commonly use a versioning nomenclature (1.0, 1.1, 2.0) to signify major or minor technology versions.

• Internet Evolution:

  • Tim Burners-Lee explained the Internet in three innovations:

    • Web of documents (Web 1.0)

    • Web of people (Web 2.0)

    • Web of data (Web 3.0)

• Web 1.0:

  • First commercialization of the Internet consisting of static websites, online directories, and marketing brochures.

• Web 2.0:

  • Period in which the Internet accommodated user participation.

  • Websites facilitated instant user engagement, collaboration, and communication.

• Current Technology: High-performing computing power, ber optics, and 5G mobile Internet allow for large le media consumption.

• Social Media Definition:

  • Forms of electronic communication, such as websites for social networking and microblogging.

  • Users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and content.

• Social Media Marketing (SMM): A specialized form of digital marketing using social media sites to distribute content, engage audiences, and advertise products/services.

• Advantages of SMM:

  • Engage with customers and stakeholders.

  • Gain insights into new products and services.

  • Cultivate trust through transparency.

  • Develop loyalty and manage perceptions.

  • Offer real-time customer service.

  • Respond quickly during crises.

• Web 3.0:

  • Refers to the semantic web using technologies, distributed databases, and intelligent applications.

  • Aims to make the Internet smarter using machine learning and AI technologies.

  • The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 took over a decade, and Web 3.0 will take much longer.

The Social Media Revolution

• Kylie Jenner's Success: Illustrates how social media marketing is serious business.

  • Forbes named Kylie Jenner the world’s “youngest-ever self-made billionaire” in 2019.

  • She connected with, educated, and sold to her followers through social media.

• Traditional Marketing Shift: Traditional marketers learn the importance of genuine connection, storytelling, and accessibility.

• Accessibility Impact:

  • Increases audience reach and encourages engagement.

  • New brands ourish by mastering the art of connection through storytelling.

The 5th “P” in the Marketing Mix: Participation

• Traditional Promotion:

  • Advertising via media providers (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, Paramount, Disney, and Time Warner) used interruption-based advertising.

  • Relied on outstanding media content to attract viewers who would pay with their time watching commercials.

• Social Media Advertising:

  • Offers engagement through comments, liking, sharing, and messaging.

  • The traditional advertising mindset is gone; marketers need to build relationships and offer useful solutions.

• Social Media Usage:

  • People spend an average of three hours per day on social networks and messaging.

  • 39% of heavy social users believe nding out about products and services is an important reason for using social networks.

• The Four P’s of Marketing:

  • Product, Price, Promotion, and Place, coined by E. Jerome McCarthy in the 1960s.

• The 5th P: Participation:

  • Introduced by Mario Sundar in 2007.

  • Means you should participate with prospects wherever they are.

• Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Marketing:

  • A powerful strategy to break through the crowded Internet.

• LAMP Framework:

  • Framework for organizations looking to introduce the 5th P: Listen, Awareness, Measure, and Participate.

• Engagement Shift:

  • Social media has changed how humans engage with each other and with brands.

Applied Marketing Science Foundations in Social Media

• Customer Empowerment:

  • Customers have more information (third-party reviews, user testimonials, social updates, videos) to make purchase decisions.

• Customer Journey:

  • Starts long before contact with a company.

  • Customers are inundated with ads, WOM recommendations, and other communications.

• Social Media Role:

  • Critical for businesses before a customer recognizes a need, during research, through conversion, and ensuring satisfaction.

• Customer Decision Journey (CDJ):

  • Represents the customer experience with a brand’s product or service.

Touchpoints and the CDJ

• Touchpoints Definition:

  • Varying ways that a brand interacts and displays information to prospective and current customers.

  • Customers experience them every time they “touch” any part of the brand across multiple channels and points in time.

• Example: Shopping for running shoes involves reviewing websites, using search engines, seeing social media ads, and receiving emails.

• AIDA Model:

  • Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action model outlines the number of touch points needed to get a prospective customer to make a purchase.

The AIDA Purchasing Model

• Marketer's Goal:

  • Increase meaningful customer touch points; social media provides a lower cost and higher impact touch point.

• Conversion Increase:

  • Marketers increase conversions by leveraging psychology and sales strategies within each touch point.

• Marketing Funnel:

  • It takes an average of $7-10$ touch points for a customer to take action.
    Adaptation of the AIDA funnel stages to customer-centric communication strategy.

Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

• Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Importance: People trust friends’ and peers’ WOM recommendations more than any other data point.

• Typology:

  • Marketers have adopted a typology for o ine and online media activity that falls into three categories: paid media, owned media, and earned media.

Table 1.1: Paid, Owned, and Earned Media

• Catalysts: Paid and owned marketing actions generate earned media activity,

The Importance of Buzz

• Third-Party Endorsement: Validates paid and owned claims, building con dence in the brand.

• Earned Influence:

  • People naturally talking about the brand.

  • Paid in uencer marketing involves compensating an endorsing party.

• Buzz and Virality:

  • The result of fostering a personalized connection, compelling people to share the brand.

• Integrated Marketing:

  • Balances paid and owned tactics to foster and accelerate online buzz in earned media.

  • Requires knowledge of marketing, budget, skills, and the brand.

The Evolution of Social Media

• Popular Platforms: Today’s platforms are evolved versions of fallen platforms.

• Understanding History: Marketers can better bet on which platforms will be relevant to them and their brands in the future by looking at patterns of social’s history.

• Platform Balance: Engaging sites need revenue investment, while overly monetized sites struggle to keep users.

• Early Recognition: Marketing professionals need to recognize when a new platform will attract customers.

• Platform Prioritization: Most organizations have limited talent and bandwidth.

Early Technologies

• 1969: ARPANET: The Internet began as a computer network to link research institutions.

• USENET:

  • A protocol that enabled the creation of distributed discussion groups.

  • Also used to distribute binary les encoded into ASCII text.

• 1978: Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs):

  • Offered much of the same functionality as social media with user interaction through the Internet.

  • It was slow and only one person could use it at a time.

• 1980s: Home Computers: Social media became more sophisticated.

• 1988: Internet Relay Chats (IRCs): First used in 1988 and popular into the 1990s.

• 19 0: CompuServe:

  • The rst major online service provider through the 1980s and 1990s.

  • Allowed members to share les, send messages (“e-mail”), and access discussion forums.

• 19 5: AOL:

  • Launched in 1991 and had about 3 million active users by 1995.

  • Credited for early social networking with member-created communities.

  • In 1995, GeoCities allowed users to create and customize their own websites.

  • TheGlobe.com launched giving users the ability to interact with people and publish their own content.

  • Organized online dating appeared with Match.com.

The First Social Networks

• 19 7: Other Sites: Classmates, Friendzy, Hi-5, and niche-driven sites like AsianAve, BlackPlanet, Mi Gente.com, and Glee.com emerged.

• Six Degrees: Credited as the rst modern social network, launched in 1997 based on the “six degrees of separation” theory.

• Foundation Concepts: Users making profiles and adding connections.

• Dating sites rarely allowed users to keep a friends list, neither did classmates at the time.

Major Advances in Social Networks

• Early social networks: allowed users to create profiles and add friends (usually without needing approval to add people).

• 20 2: Friendster:

  • The rst modern social networking site that we de ne today

  • Used the degree of separation concept similar to Six Degrees but dubbed it “Circle of Friends.”

  • Gained 3,000,000 users in the first three months

• 20 3: Myspace:

  • Cloned Friendster. Launched in 2003.

  • Known for real-time status updates posted in your friends newsfeed

  • Allowed for user profile customization that became the hub of a generation

  • Garnered 90 million registered users—only to watch its glory days fade away to Facebook.

• Second Life:

  • Launched in 2003 and gained niche popularity at around only one million active users.

  • The technology and premise serve as the foundation to the socialization of virtual reality (VR).

• LinkedIn:

  • Established in 2003 with a professional and business approach.

  • Bought by Microsoft in 2016, and according to Amazon Alexa website ranking, it was the 21st biggest website in the world and 10th in the United States in late 2018.

• Flickr:

  • Launched in 2004, and it was acquired by Yahoo a little over a year later.

  • Pioneered the idea of basing an entire community around photo-sharing, laying the groundwork for Tumblr and Instagram.

• 20 4: Facebook:

  • Facebook remains to be the benchmark of success for all other platforms in the world.

  • Exclusivity. They had a closed membership where members were invited people in prestigious universities.

• Digg Launched in 2004 as a news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories speci cally for the Internet audience, such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues.

• 20 5: Qzone: A social networking website based in China. Started out as the Chinese version of Facebook.

• YouTube: Revolutionized how the world watches television, creating the world’s most popular and immersive video platform.

• WorldStarHipHop: A content-aggregating video blog founded in 2005. One of the rst niche sites for African Americans. The platform has been criticized for promoting illegal content and inciting violence in the past but has since rebranded.

• Reddit: A social news aggregation, web content rating site launched in 2005.

• 20 7: Tumblr: Launched in 2007 as a cross between an image sharing, microblogging, and video clip sharing site.

• 2010 Google Buzz:

  • Launched in 2010 and was short-lived. In 2012 shut down.

• Instagram:

  • Launched in 2010. In 2012, Facebook acquired the app to compete with Snapchat.

• Pinterest:

  • Launched in 2010. Introduce “buyable pins.”

• 201 A er Google+:

  • Launched in 2011. Rebranded with as a +1.

• Snapchat:

  • Created in 2011 to create a visual instant messaging platform.

  • Snapchat also invented the concept of “stories, ” time limits on visual content, and event-driven geofencing.

• Nextdoor

  • Introduced in the United States in 2011.

  • Nextdoor is the rst digital community board where only con rmed residents could access and engage.

• 2013 Vine:

  • Launched in 2013 after Twitter acquired the video-clip platform. Vine was shut down in 2017 to allow users to upload directly to Twitter.

• TikTo k:

  • Launched in China in 2012 is the rst Chinese-based social media platform to gain traction in the United States.

  • In 2018, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the United States, the rst Chinese app to achieve that level of success.