WEEK EIGHT - TO MARKET TO MARKET TO BUY A WEB 2.0

This weeks lecture was delivered by Alexis Barlow and was on marketing - concept and orientation. How Web 2.0 is transforming marketing techniques. We looked at the 5P's of marketing, all of which were covered in college (however I appreciate that not everyone in the lecture has this background) Product, Price, Place, People and Promotion. Business Dictionary defined Marketing as 'The management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer.' As a philosophy marketing is based on the business in terms of what the customers want and delivering their needs. Web 2.0 Marketing doesn't appear to be much different and the principles are pretty much the same as we looked at leveraging Marketing and the elements of the Promotional Ps and the use of e-technologies. E-marketing is defined slightly differently to Marketing as it uses electronic communication technology to achieve marketing objectives.  I found an interesting article on Google Scholar - Web 2.0 Storytelling Emergence of a New Genre.  This article suggests the pattern is changing and that social media marketing is open-ended, branching, hyper-linked, cross media, participatory, exploratory and unpredictable. So how can we control Marketing on-line? Simple answer we can't but we can perhaps guide it in a particular direction.

From this we were able to discuss ways in which we thought that the Internet has impacted on the 5 Ps:

Product - Introduces a digital version such as the iPad, Kindle or Tablet. Improves the product for example, the anticipated iPad 3 with voice dictation!
Price - Has become more competitive perhaps due to less overheads so companies able to lower prices. Differential pricing. Price can also be adjusted to meet the market, example given was BA flight prices in comparison to Sleazyjet.... eh Easyjet. You get what you pay for!
Place - Geographically can be reached globally and provides opportunities for new channel structures. Also virtual space is all that is required, for example eBay who rely on items being sold by customers and they do not need to offer catalogue, shop or warehouse space.
People - how you personalise with the use of customer service and advertising the image of your company.
Promotion - Emphasis being on promotion and how you tell people about your company. This was discussed further in the lecture.

Actually found this lecture really interesting even though I had covered marketing before - e-marketing is on a whole new level and I enjoy seeing things from another viewpoint and perhaps thinking about things I wouldn't have before.

We then went on to look at Integrated Marketing Communications where an organisation would use a mix of agents and traditional & internet promotion mix and how this is affected by Social Media. MMC Learning suggest that Integrated Marketing Communications is just a method of ensuring all forms of communiaction and messages are carefully linked together by integrating all promotional tools to ensure they work together. There are a number of definitions for Web 2.0 Marketing which we looked at but linking back to last week and the documentary we watched 'Mark Zuckerberg - Inside Facebook' we were able to see how social media had progressed to take members of virtual communities and how individuals link globally, to the extent that in November 2011 The Telegraph reported Facebook have suggested that the average number of connections between people has dropped from 6 down to 4!! Isn't that a bit crazy? Web 2.0 therefore creates a new and dynamic way to communicate and companies can effectively jump on the band wagon and use social media to communicate to customers, customers can communicate with each other and allows consumer participation in the form of feedback, discussion and debate. A short YouTube video simplified the process in four steps:
STEP 1 - Find interested people
STEP 2 - Deliver quality content
STEP 3 - Capture information
STEP 4 - Stay in touch and enables you to sell stuff!

But to what extent do companies shape discussion, surely Web 2.0 is a critical access point to reach and engage online audiences - Facebook have 800 million users at the last count! By using Facebook as an example it can influence consumer behaviour. Using my own experiences with Facebook I am often made aware of events that are happening through the use of Event Invites by my friends. My friends also post links to news or youtube videos which keep me up-to-date with things that are happening and makes me aware of whats happening as well as things they are interested in. For example my cousin sent me an invite to Cover the Night - Kony 2012 in April, but its not an event! It's just to raise awareness of a man who has spent 26 years abducting children and on 20th April they want people to wear red in protest!! I'm also guilty of asking for peoples opinions on Facebook, for example I asked my friends if they could recommend a new fitness class to me that wouldn't see me pass out 30 minutes in!!!! The response was phenomenol and I'm now booked for Cross Fit at Primal Legion. Yeah the pictures look a bit scary but I'm willing to try everything once! Now I'm also quite nosey and my friends are guilty of checking in wherever they are and shops they like or items they like and I like to follow that up and check it out! So how do Social Media sites influence this? By selling our information to advertisers? But another factor to this about is how safe our information is, do we expose ourself by revealing information in online communities such as Facebook? I read a new article in the Daily Record about a student who was writing a blog as part of her University Degree....sounds familiar! She was obviously a bit better at it that me and she attached her photo to the blog, but later discovered her picture on jumpers which were sold in Tesco!!! Now should she not be flattered that someone other than the lecturers read her blog?