Foundations of Social Media Marketing

The Social Media have changed the power structures in the marketplace; evidence points to a major power migration taking place and to emergence of a new breed of powerful and sophisticated customer, difficult to influence, persuade and retain The paper outlines the nature, effects and present status of the Social Media, underlying their role as customer empowerment agents. It explains their aptitude and possible roles as part of the corporate Marketing strategy and identifies different ways of engaging them as marketing tools. The paper proposes two possible Social Media marketing strategies: a. The passive approach focusing on utilizing the Social Media domain as source of customer voice and market intelligence. b. The active approach i.e. engaging the Social Media as direct marketing and PR channels, as channels of customer influence, as tools of personalizing products and last but not least develop them as platforms of co-operation and customer-generated innovation. Finally the paper identifies future research directions around this new element of the marketing landscape (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd.