رسانه های اجتماعی: ترکیبی عناصر جدید ترکیب ارتقایی

The emergence of Internet-based social media has made it possible for one person to communicate with hundreds or even thousands of other people about products and the companies that provide them. Thus, the impact of consumer-to-consumer communications has been greatly magnified in the marketplace. This article argues that social media is a hybrid element of the promotion mix because in a traditional sense it enables companies to talk to their customers, while in a nontraditional sense it enables customers to talk directly to one another. The content, timing, and frequency of the social media-based conversations occurring between consumers are outside managers’ direct control. This stands in contrast to the traditional integrated marketing communications paradigm whereby a high degree of control is present. Therefore, managers must learn to shape consumer discussions in a manner that is consistent with the organization's mission and performance goals. Methods by which this can be accomplished are delineated herein. They include providing consumers with networking platforms, and using blogs, social media tools, and promotional tools to engage customers.

IMC has traditionally been considered to be largely one-way in nature. In the old paradigm, the organization and its agents developed the message and transmitted it to potential consumers, who may or may not have been willing participants in the communication process. The control over the dissemination of information was in the hands of the marketing organization. The traditional elements of the promotion mix—advertising, personal selling, public relations and publicity, direct marketing, and sales promotion—were the tools through which control was asserted. In this article, we argue that marketing managers should include social media in the promotion mix when developing and executing their IMC strategies. This is consistent with Boone and Kurtz's (2007) assertion that the objective of integrated marketing communications is to “coordinate all [emphasis added by authors] promotional activities of the firm to produce a unified, customer focused promotional message” (p. 488). Accomplishing this requires the adoption of a new communications paradigm that acknowledges the pervasiveness of information now being exchanged among consumers in the social media space. This new paradigm considers social media to be a hybrid element of the promotion mix in that it combines some of the characteristics of traditional IMC tools with a highly magnified form of word-of-mouth communications in which marketing managers cannot control the content and frequency of such information. This contrasts sharply with the hegemony managers are accustomed to exercising over all aspects of information distribution in the traditional paradigm. However, marketing managers do have the ability to shape the discussion by using the methods described in this article. Although marketing managers cannot control information disseminated through social media, ignoring the realities of the impact of information transmitted through these forums on consumer behavior is tantamount to surrendering the communications process to the vagaries of the marketplace. By including social media in the promotion mix, these new communication formats are given a home in standard marketing management practices and theories. This new-found home for social media provides managers with a better understanding of social media and a framework for incorporating it into their IMC strategies, thus more effectively communicating with their target markets.