In my previous post I made the point that marketing strategies based on social media actually work (something I keep saying to my students for more than four years). As another confirmation of this I suggest my readers to have a look in the way Domino's Pizza is using the Social media and how this strategy has resulted in higher brand preference but more importantly to higher sales. Ben & Jerry's story is similar: in this case the switch from email marketing (that I never personally found such a great idea as an example of push marketing) to social media marketing was something that their customers actually demanded! The bottom line in both cases is that the modern marketer can not afford any more to ignore the social media as an increasingly important area of activity. This goes hand in hand with the realization that some serious work and investment is required here (something very obvious if you read just these two cases).
For me these developments are very welcome as well as expected and I feel that the research efforts of my Spanish colleagues and myself as well as our Social Media Research Center initiative on pursuing academic underpinning of the social media marketing are proved to be in the right direction. This is sometimes at odds with the ideas of colleagues who review some of our article submissions: Recently one of them saw nothing new in a study identifying customer segments among social networking sites users. As far as I know there is no word about this in any marketing textbook and academic contributions in this subject can be counted in the fingers of one hand. Anyway the practitioners are showing us once more the way, something regrettable since it should be actually the other way around. The good thing is that slowly but surely the number of students and even PhD's interested in social media marketing is growing. This blog that started in December of 2007 is a modest contribution to this direction but still supports the view (expressed in the very first post) that Web 2.0 and Social media is something worth attention and scholarship
