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Marketing Communication to and with Net Citizens: Targeting by Means of a Social Network Analysis Approach
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Marketing Communication to and with Net Citizens: Targeting by Means of a Social Network Analysis ApproachMartin Klaus, Jörg Schwerdtfeger & Ralf Wagnermklaus@wirtschaft.uni-kassel.de rwagner@wirtschaft.uni-kassel.de schwerdtfeger.joerg@googlemail.com SVI Endowed Chair for International Direct Marketing DMCC – Dialog Marketing Competence Center University of Kassel Mönchebergstr 17, D-34125 Kassel, Germany Empirical investigations of the time devoted to Internet interactions indicate that this time surpasses the time spent passively watching TV. This provides marketers with new communication opportunities: First, the WWW is becoming progressively more important in the media world in relation to the phenomenal speed at which it is growing. Even more important, and in contrast to TV-recipients, net citizens are not passive, but explore information actively, choose by themselves the contents that are interesting and sift out less relevant contents and communication partners. They are not restricted to just receiving companies’ marketing communication, but can interact with both vendors and other customers in real time and leave their individual opinions, recommendations and reports on experiences with products and services in newsgroups and blogs. These information and communication fragments could remain for years in the virtual environment. Thus, for marketers, it is one of the major issues to identify individuals who are willing to engage in a positive communication process and potentially persuade other individuals to join this communication and share their opinions. In this study, we introduce an approach for marketing communication on MySpace online communities. For targeting individuals, we consider the users’ position in the information space by means of social network analysis. We develop four different marketing options for advertising on MySpace. As an illustration, we outline these marketing options using the example of a fictive product launch campaign. Track Indication: Track 3: Co-Operating for Consumer Citizenship. 1. Introduction The spread of broadband connections, the ever increasing use of the Internet and the new, consumer-generated content of the Web 2.0 make the Internet more challenging for marketers than ever. In 2008, spending on Internet marketing exceeded that of classic TV marketing for the first time (BWT, 2008). Most of the budget on Internet marketing comprises: spending on corporate home pages, banner, pop-ups and e-mail marketing, but online communities also attract the interest of marketers. Online communities deliver two main categories of information. First, they usually include some attributes about their user, such as a name or a nickname, age, origin, preferences and others. Second, they include an interactive social network between the actors, where the users are the knots, and their connections to friends are the ties. The combination of the information of the network and the attributes can be used to identify a very specific target group of users which are promising in terms of their position in the social network, and seem to fit the product by their attributes. For this paper, we chose the MySpace online community as a database for research because the community is open and freely accessible to everyone without a registration and login. The MySpace community comprises 118 million users in 17 different countries (Stelter, 2008), the largest online network on which users can create their own profiles with their own content (text, pictures, movies and other applications, particularly widgets like calendars, clocks, or counters) and publish according to their own design. MySpace, like many other online communities, gives companies the opportunity to set up banner ads on community profiles. However, MySpace goes even further and does not present the same banner to all users and visitors. Marketers can specify their target groups according to attributes of user profiles and then select matching banner advertising to them. 2007 saw the launch of a refinement of this procedure of selecting the profiles utilizing a text mining technology for each member’s profile. Thus, in addition to the attributes, marketers can choose adequate keywords, like “gaming” or “lifestyle”, in order to select target group profiles (Stone, 2008). This is marketing from MySpace. Another opportunity to use MySpace for marketing purposes is to do it on MySpace, which means that companies set up their own campaign profiles in the community. Up until now, MySpace has not been used very often by marketers, except by the music industry, which uses MySpace frequently to promote stars (recently, Pink and Justin Timberlake). They feature new songs, introduce new album releases, announce tour dates, and stay in contact with fans. Competing with established labels, young, independent, ambitious musicians and bands use MySpace to increase their popularity. However, possibilities to individualize the marketing measures in online communities like MySpace are not currently fully exploited. This paper aims to: Introduce a procedure to get involved with target groups of net citizens more efficiently than they do currently. Our procedure relies on the distinction of two different qualities of information obtained from online communities: the interaction structure by means of the net citizens’ networks and the content provided by the individuals. It combines quantitative assessments from Social Network Analysis (SNA) with the attributes of the MySpace profiles: In doing so, we obtain a new quality of target information to trigger individual and direct addressed marketing communication with and between community members. We demonstrate the practicability of this procedure by outlining four scenarios of enhanced marketing on MySpace. In the following section, we provide a brief overview of previous investigations of MySpace. Subsequently, Chapter 3 introduces the dataset which we used for this study. In Chapter 4, we outline our procedure in detail and end with a table of opportunities for marketing on MySpace. Taking the example of a fictive product campaign, these opportunities, worked out as an example with all the introduced marketing options on MySpace, are adopted. 2. Related Work Social networks have been studied for more than 50 years (e.g., Milgram, 1967), but the rise of communities in the WWW within the past ten years has increasingly drawn the attention of marketing scholars and practitioners (Zhang, Ackerman, & Adamic, 2007). The usability of already established social networks for marketing and market research, or as a supplemental instrument for sales forces, has already been investigated. Ma, Yang, Lyu, and King (2008) conclude that a heat diffusion model fits the spread of opinion in social networks better than the Bass diffusion model. Some of the most recent publications meet the claim of Subramani and Rajagopalan (2003) to overcome the limitations of descriptive accounts of particular initiatives and advice based on anecdotal evidence when considering digital word-of-mouth phenomena. Recent research focuses on quantitative measures related to the results of the activities: for instance, the adoption of new ideas, products or opinions (Cheung et al., 2008; Ma et al., 2008; De Bruyn & Lilien, 2008), the impact on purchase probabilities (East et al., 2008) and reputation-related issues (Helm, 2000; Reichheld, 2003). However, these efforts do not fully cover the antecedents of marketing activities. From a practitioner’s point of view, most interesting is the identification of net citizens, who are willing to engage in marketing communication and who are suited to spread the message over their social networks. In this vein, Subramani and Rajagopalan (2003, p. 300) already called for “an analysis of viral marketing that highlights systematic patterns in the nature of knowledge-sharing and persuasion by influencers and responses by recipients in online social networks.” Some attempts have been made at considering our application domain of the MySpace network: Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini (2007) analyzed related issues using a small sample of 100 MySpace citizens. The revelation of personal information on MySpace has recently been investigated by Hinduja and Patchin (2008). Caverlee and Webb (2008) analyzed, in a large-scale study, the observations and implications for the social network behind MySpace. However, these studies are restricted either to: considering social demographic variables and their relation to digital communication behavior or position in the communication net. To enhance a comprehensive understanding, both aspects need to be integrated in the analysis framework. 3. Data For this study, both the interaction structure and content provided by the individual net citizens were crawled for 19,477 profiles on the MySpace platform in May 2008 using the SocSciBot software (provided by Thelwall, 2004) in a two-step approach. First, the network structure between a subset of relationship-based MySpace profiles were backed up. In other words, all best friends listed on the welcome page, which can be prearranged by the author of the profile, were followed through the MySpace communities to receive the friendship network of the 19,477 MySpace citizens. Second, attributes which also appeared on a profile’s welcome page were crawled. The attributes – friends, age, page type, gender, privacy, origin, marital status, religion, sex, last login, number of comments, and “here for” – were collected and saved for all the citizens. Assessing these data revealed that 98% of all profiles were quite active. Their last log-in was within the last month. Only about 50% of the profiles revealed their age, and from those who did, about 56% were under 30 years old. The age distribution was right skewed: 76% of the citizens were under 40 years old. Half of the profiles were musicians and the other half were various citizens. The gender was balanced within the MySpace community and the majority did not acknowledge the motivation (“here for”) for engaging in this community. An impressive 87% of all citizens in our sample kept their content public for everybody. Just 13% kept their profile private for them and their friends only. In summary, the descriptive assessment our data match the descriptions of the community at hand in recent publications. Thus, we expect our sample to match the tendencies outlined by Thelwall (2008a), Caverlee and Webb (2008) and Hinduja and Patchin (2008). Analysis of the friendship structure is likely to reveal important hints for assessing or triggering communication processes with or between citizens. This topic is of general interest, but particularly relevant for modern marketing activities. An effective assessment of this structure is based on the tails of the link distribution. A typical phenomenon in online communities is the heavy-tail distribution of the users’ number of relations to other users. In this heavy-tail distribution, a majority of individuals have a relatively small number of out-flowing links to profiles of other users. A few users (the hubs in the informal sub-networks) have a high number of outgoing relations to other users. The function of link frequencies draws a hyperbola if the number of links is opposed to the count of the profiles which leads to a linear relation in the log-log system. However, real social networks never build a pure hyperbola because they emerge from a combination of randomly accruing links and links which accrue because of preferential attachment by the profiles (Barabasi, 2007). This log-log system can be approximated by a power function with the form (Pennock, Flake, Lawrence, Glover, and Giles, 2002):  . The hyperbola approximating our data is given by  with a coefficient of determination  . This result indicates a substantive heavy-tailed distribution. In contrast to the studies of Pennock et al. (2002) and Karandikar (2007), we used a log-log system. Thus, the frequency is a cumulative distribution (Newman, 2004, Appendix A). We simply add -1 in the exponent to provide a suited comparison with the non-integral forms from previous studies. Our comparable result is  . Social communities (like the whole Blogosphere) usually have an exponent between 1.51 and 2.12 (Karandikar, 2007). The link structure of websites is characterized by a higher exponent between 2.1 and 2.45 (Albert et al., 1999). This means that the gradient for websites is steeper than it is for social communities. According to Vazquez (2003), the interpretation of this difference is that the web is likely to grow faster than social communities. Considering the result for MySpace, the exponent is even higher than the upper limit of the interval for conventional web pages, which is about 2.45. Thus, the MySpace social community differentiates from other social communities by its dynamic gain of new citizens. It is likely to outpace the web. Therefore, the MySpace community is of particular interest for marketers. Although the MySpace community has very strong hubs, this network is more suited for direct and viral communication. Figure 1 illustrates the log-log plot of the MySpace friendship structure.
Figure 1: Distribution of the profiles ranked by their number of friends in a log-log illustration The interesting part of the curve is the interval between 3 and 5 for the log (# of friends): Here, the curve is almost linear. Thus, the correlation between the log (# of individuals to engage in marketing communication) and the log (# of individuals reached with this communication) is almost stable. Consequently, in this network, mouth-to-mouth communication is going to reach a number of recipients described by the power law (Caverlee & Webb, 2008). Thus, marketing activities can be highly effective. Viral marketing involving community citizens is not only communication to the profile owner (e.g., an advertisement) or with the profile owner (e.g., postings, e-mail contact, bulletin), but also to all the visitors, readers and friends who look at the profile. Thus, we argue the combination of attributes and the network structure of profiles to be essential ingredients for suited targeting of modern online marketing activities. Directory: content -> download download -> Appendix appendix 0 the florida emergency telephone act download -> Fia wtcc race of Portugal boosts Championship Battle download -> Définitions download -> Press release 6 July 2012 Financial year 2011/12: facc achieves record turnover download -> Curriculum vitae eleanor jane sterling download -> Practical Application of the casve cycle of Career Problem Solving and Decision-Making download -> What are Competencies? download -> Bruce almighty Download 6.3 Mb. Share with your friends:
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