Introduction To Social Media Analysis Marketing Essay

Introduction To Social Media Analysis Marketing Essay Introduction to Social Media Analysis People are talking about you-your company, your products, your people. With modern, digital communications tools, theyre publishing their thoughts to a worldwide audience. They write on blogs and in online communities, and they share pictures and videos on popular sites, such as MySpace and YouTube. Sometimes, the issues they raise show up on the front page of major newspapers. Paying attention to these online conversations is a new imperative for anyone who cares about their companys reputation. Social media analysis is the broad term for the services and tools you will use to pay attention. It incorporates monitoring, measuring and analyzing Internet-based social media, usually combining automated systems and human insight to turn raw data into useful information. Its most often used in marketing and communications/PR functions, which is why some people call it brand monitoring. But theres more to it than monitoring, and its not used only in marketing. Customer service, product groups, competitive intelligence, and investor relations-or any other relations function-will find useful information. Specialized applications for institutional investors, lenders and supply-chain managers are also available. If you use information, social media analysis opens vast new sources. Idea behind This Study: In Pakistan very few people are encouraging their businesses through social media marketing, mostly our internet usage went under the heading of ENTERTAINEMENT, so I want to study that where the actually person drive to while using Internet in Pakistan. How social media marketing can help us? How it is used, what are its advantages and disadvantages, how to build interest in it and those who are using and making money through it, how they are doing this? ABSTRACTS SAP A Company Transforms Itself Through Social Media This case study was written to demonstrate how a company can create a social networking platform that not only achieves its tactical goals of pushing company content to its target audience, but also broader, strategic purposes aligned with the companys corporate profile and brand. The study will look at technologies used to develop the SDN and the BPX networks, the quality of the user experience, and metrics achieved, as well as issues related to maintaining and growing the network. SAP, faced a new challenge. No longer was it content simply to be a developer of much of the worlds most successful business software. Instead, it wished to become a platform company, on its own Web-based platform solution: NetWeaver. That meant it had to open its platform to developers outside its own walls, who would drive innovative ways for businesses to use this platform to solve their business problems. It meant it had to talk to a huge, new audience that had not been part of its prior focus: developers across the globe that may or may not be SAP employees. Additional objectives included a desire to increase adoption of SAP products and to provide a platform of innovation for SAP and its partners. To obtain the main goal, SAP launches two new softwares for this called as SDN and BPX. Both networks are transparent, anyone can sign up, and both are searchable. Users can subscribe and obtain RSS feeds from the most popular bloggers, and all the content is accessible to social book-marking sites, as well as from Google and other search sites. SAP was formerly viewed as rigid, monolithic, and overly process-oriented but after adoption of Social Media it is now viewed as open and collaborative Methodology: Discussion Forums were opened up in Web page format where a rate of about 4,000 posts Per day was recorded. These were followed by blogs, initially contributed by employees, and quickly opened to outsiders. Active contributors include customers, consultants, and other opinion leaders, and the blogs feature everything from long-form essays on relevant topics to shorter bursts about future trends or interesting innovations. Conclusion Finally, the author speculates on how the success of the combined networks could lead to further revenue growth and enhancement of current corporate communications. How People Perceive Online Behavioral Advertising They performed a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 subjects who answered advertisements to participate in a university study about Internet advertising. Subjects were not informed this study had to do with behavioral advertising privacy, but raised privacy concerns on their own unprompted. They asked, What are the best and worst things about Internet advertising? and what do you think about Internet advertising? Participants held a wide range of views ranging from enthusiasm about ads that inform them of new products and discounts they would not otherwise know about, to resignation that ads are a fact of life, to resentment of ads that they find insulting. Many participants raised privacy issues in the first few minutes of discussion without any prompting about privacy. They discovered that many participants have a poor understanding of how Internet advertising works, do not understand the use of first-party cookies, let alone third-party cookies, did not realize that behavioral advertising already takes place, believe that their actions online are completely anonymous unless they are logged into a website, and believe that there are legal protections that prohibit companies from sharing information they collect online. They found that participants have substantial confusion about the results of the actions they take within their browsers, do not understand the technology they work with now, and clear cookies as much out of a notion of hygiene as for privacy. They also found divergent views on what constitutes advertising. Industry self-regulation guidelines assume consumers can distinguish third-party widgets from first-party content, and further assume that consumers understand data flows to third-party advertisers. Instead, we find some people are not even aware of when they are being advertised to, let alone aware of what data is collected or how it is used. Methodology: A series of in-depth qualitative interviews with 14 subjects were conducted. A modified mental models protocol of semi-structured interviews were followed using standard preliminary questions for all participants while also following up individually to gather participants understanding of and reaction to behavioral advertising in particular. Conclusion Consumers have a very clear understanding of when and where Google search displays advertisements. However, consumers do not understand which parts of the New York Times website are advertisements. They lack the knowledge to distinguish widgets from first party content. Consequently, it is overly optimistic to believe consumers know their data flows to widget providers as a first party. THE VALUE OF A FACEBOOK FAN: AN EMPIRICAL REVIEW As Facebook matures as a viable marketing and customer service channel, many organizations are looking to quantify and understand the impact of their overall marketing investment on their business. Quantifying the Return on investment (ROI) of Facebook marketing efforts includes multiple variables and companies often fail to understand and to properly value their efforts in terms of the potential long-term business benefits of the Facebook channel. Many brands overcomplicate their measurement requirements by tracking dozens of independent variables. Many oversimplify by trying to apply a single number concept of value, and far too many fail to quantify ROI in such a way as to convince a CFO of the merit of increasing or shifting investment towards Facebook marketing. Syncapse has adopted a unique approach to understanding the financial returns that social members on Facebook provide to a business. Facebook fan ROI can be understood though a knowledge of key performance indicators that have traditionally led to increased sales and profit in business and the key differences between Facebook users who have opted to fan a brand and those who have not. This study will examine the five leading contributors to Facebook fan value. (1) Product Spending (2) Brand Loyalty, (3) Propensity to Recommend, (4) Brand Affinity and (5) Earned Media Value. Methodology The quantitative research for this Syncapse undertaking was conducted in conjunction with Hotspex Market Research and consisted of a 25-minute survey using their online panel. Data was collected from over 4,000 panelists across North America in June 2010. Conclusion As growing audiences migrate to social networks like Facebook, a brands ability to connect and influence these customers must shift from traditional marketing strategies. Facebook fans represent a significant opportunity to drive revenue enhancement, brand, and loyalty without incurring the considerable cost-per-person of conventional marketing. More importantly, such Facebook strategies allow for a discernable ROI that is not allowed by most other approaches. Fans are an extremely valuable segment of the Internet audience and should be addressed with specific strategies to nurture their ongoing participation and influence. Unlike traditional campaign-based marketing, Facebook-based marketing through well crafted fan utilization has no defined shelf life and can be more readily integrated into the day-to-day operation of the enterprise. Social Media Use in the United States: Implications for Health Communication Given the rapid changes in the communication landscape brought about by participative Internet use and social media, it is important to develop a better understanding of these technologies and their impact on health communication. The first step in this effort is to identify the characteristics of current social media users. Up-to-date reporting of current social media use will help monitor the growth of social media and inform health promotion/communication efforts aiming to effectively utilize social media. The purpose of the study is to identify the sociodemographic and health-related factors associated with current adult social media users in the United States. Methods: Data came from the 2007 iteration of the Health Information National Trends Study (HINTS, N = 7674). HINTS is a nationally representative cross-sectional survey on health-related communication trends and practices. Survey respondents who reported having accessed the Internet (N = 5078) were asked whether, over the past year, they had (1) participated in an online support group, (2) written in a blog, (3) visited a social networking site. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were conducted to identify predictors of each type of social media use. Conclusions: Recent growth of social media is not uniformly distributed across age groups; therefore, health communication programs utilizing social media must first consider the age of the targeted population to help ensure that messages reach the intended audience. While racial/ethnic and health status-related disparities exist in Internet access, among those with Internet access, these characteristics do not affect social media use. This finding suggests that the new technologies, represented by social media, may be changing the communication pattern throughout the United States. DELIVRABLE II Introduction Billions of people create trillions of connections through social media each day, but few of us consider how each click and key press builds relationships that, in aggregate, form a vast social network. Passionate users of social media tools such as email, blogs, microblogs, and wikis eagerly send personal or public messages, post strongly felt opinions, or contribute to community knowledge to develop partnerships, promote cultural heritage, and advance development. Devoted social networkers create and share digital media and rate or recommend resources to pool their experiences, provide help for neighbors and colleagues, and express their creativity. The results are vast, complex networks of connections that link people to other people, documents, locations, concepts, and other objects. New tools are now available to collect, analyze, visualize, and generate insights from the collections of connections formed from billions of messages, links, posts, edits, uploaded photos and videos , reviews, and recommendations. As social media have emerged as a widespread platform for human interaction, the invisible ties that link each of us to others have become more visible and machine readable. The result is a new opportunity to map social networks in detail and scale never before seen. The complex structures that emerge from webs of social relationships can now be studied with computer programs and graphical maps that leverage the science of social network analysis to capture the shape and key locations within a landscape of ties and links. These maps can guide new journeys through social landscapes that were previously uncharted. Social network analysis is the application of the broader field of network science to the study of human relationships and connections. Social networks are primordial; they have a history that long predates systems like Facebook and Friendster, and even the first email message. Ever since anyone exchanged help with anyone else, social networks have existed, even if they were mostly invisible. Social networks are created from any collection of connections among a group of people and things. In the twenty-first century, network science has blossomed alongside a new global culture of commonplace networked communications. With widespread network connectivity, within just the past few decades, billions of people have changed their lives by creatively using social media. We use social media to bring our families and friends closer together, reach out to neighbors and colleagues, and invigorate markets for products and services. Social media are used to create connections that can bind local regions and span continents. These connections range from the trivial to the most valued, potent collaborations, relationships, and communities. Social media tools have been used successfully to create large-scale successful collaborative public projects like Wikipedia, open source software used by millions, new forms of political participation, and scientific collaboratories that accelerate research. Unheard of just a few years ago, today systems such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, and Facebook are now headline news with social and political implications that stretch around the globe. Despite the very different shapes, sizes, and goals of the institutions involved in social media, the common structure that unifies all social media spaces is a social network. All of these systems create connections that leave traces and collectively create networks. The rise of social media Social media are visible in the form of consumer applications such as Facebook and Twitter, but significant use of social media tools takes place behind the firewalls that surround most corporations, institutions, and organizations. Inside these enterprises employees share documents, post messages and engage in extensive discussions, document annotation, and create extensive patterns of connections with other employees and other resources. Social media tools cultivate the internal discussions that improve quality, lower costs, and enable the creation of customer and partner communities that offer new opportunities for coordination, marketing, advertising, and customer support. As enterprises adopt tools like email, message boards, blogs, wikis, document sharing, and activity streams, they generate a number of social network data structures. These networks contain information that has significant business value by exposing participants in the business network who play critical and unique roles. Some employees act as bridges or brokers between otherwise separated segments of the company. Others have patterns of connection that indicate that they serve as sources of information for many others. Social network analysis of organizations offers a form of MRI or x-ray image of the organizational structure of the company. These images illuminate the ways the members of the organization are actually structured in contrast to the formal hierarchies. Individual Contributions Generate Public Wealth Collections of individual social media contributions can create vast, often beneficial, yet complex social institutions. Seeing the social media forest, and not just the trees, branches, and leaves, requires tools that can assemble, organize, and present an integrated view of large volumes of records of interactions. Building a better view of the social media landscape of connection can lead to improved user interfaces and policies that increase individual contributions and their quality. It can lead to better management tools and strategies that help individuals, organizations, and governments to more effectively apply social media to their priorities. However, dangerous criminals, malicious vandals, promoters of racial hatred, and oppressive governments can also use social media tools to enable destructive activities. Critics of social media warn of the dangers of lost responsibility and respect for creative contributions, when vital resources are assembled from many small pieces [1]. These dangers heighten interest in understanding how social media phenomena can be studied, improved, and protected. Why do some groups of people succeed in using these tools while many others fail? Community managers and participants can learn to use social network maps of their social media spaces to cultivate their best features and limit negative outcomes. Social network measures and maps can be used to gain insights into collective activity and guide optimization of their productive capacity while limiting the destructive forces that plague most efforts at computer-mediated communications. People interested in cultivating these communities can m easure and map social media activity in order to compare and contrast social media efforts to one another. Around the world, community stakeholders, managers, leaders, and members have found that they can all benefit from learning how to apply social network analysis methods to study, track, and compare the dynamics of their communities and the influence of individual contributions. Business leaders and analysts can study enterprise social networks to improve the performance of organizations by identifying key contributors, locating gaps or disconnections across the organization, and discovering important documents and other digital objects. Marketing and service directors can use social media network analysis to guide the promotion of their products and services, track compliments and complaints, and respond to priority customer requests. Community managers can apply these techniques to public-facing systems that gather people around a common interest and ensure that socially productive relationships are established. Social media tools have become central to national priorities requiring government agency leaders to become skillful in building and managing their communities and connections. Governments at all levels must learn to optimize and sustain social media tools for public health information dissemination, disaster response, energy conservation, environmental protection, community safety, and more. Background to the Problem Billions of people now weave a complex collection of email, Twitter, mobile short text messages, shared photos, podcasts, audio and video streams, blogs, wikis, discussion groups, virtual reality game environments, and social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace to connect them to the world and the people they care about. Twitter enable short exchanges ideal for efficiently pointing out resources or knowing what conferences people are attending, while discouraging in-depth discussion and analysis on the platform itself. In contrast, traditional blogs without length limitations and with their support for sharing multimedia content and comments are better suited for more in-depth presentations and conversations. Other media including books, newspapers, wikis, email, social networking sites, and so forth each have a set of properties that create a unique terrain of interaction. Learning to effectively meet your objectives using social media requires an understanding of that terrain and the social practices that have grown up around its use. One of the most exciting aspects of online social media tools is that they produce an enormous amount of social data that can be used to better understand the people, organizations, and communities that inhabit them. More specifically, they create relational data: information about who knows or is friends with whom, who talks to whom, who hangs out in the same places, and who enjoys the same things. Social Media Design Framework Social media systems come in a variety of forms and support numerous genres of interaction. Although they all connect individuals, they do so in dramatically different ways depending in part on the technical design choices that determine questions like these: Who can see what? Who can reply to whom? How long is content visible? What can link to what? Who can link to whom? Social media services vary in terms of their intended number of producers and consumers. An email is usually authored by just one person, whereas a wiki document is likely to be authored by several or even hundreds of people. An individually authored email might be sent to just one other person or be broadcasted to thousands. More generally, social media tools support different scales of production and consumption of digital objects. Many social media tools help individuals or small groups interact. Instant messaging (IM), video chat, and personal messaging within general-purpose social networking sites provide intimate communication channels comparable to phone calls and face-to-face office meetings. Social media can help individuals reach out to medium-sized groups of friends or acquaintances by broadcasting a personal message (e.g., a tweet sent to a users followers on Twitter; a post sent to a departmental email list) or allowing others to overhear a comment (a post to someones Facebook wall). They can also allow individuals to reach large groups through popular blog posts, podcasts, videos posted on sites like YouTube, or updates on Twitter by companies or celebrities with numerous followers. Purpose of the Research Thousands of people are earning huge amount of money through Social Media, This research will help to understand that when one person enters into social media, what is his path and where does he go? This Research will also help to understand that how can a person earn from a particular social network website. Research Questions To understand the pattern of browsing of individuals using social media network. To check the awareness among the people of earning through social media. How an individual can earn through Social Media in Pakistan? How this pattern can be used to gain maximum output in online advertising. DELIVERABLE III Medium of Research Social Network Theory Social network analysis is the application of the broader field of network science to the study of human relationships and connections. Social networks are primordial; they have a history that long predates systems like Facebook and Friendster, and even the first email message. Ever since anyone exchanged help with anyone else, social networks have existed, even if they were mostly invisible. Social networks are created from any collection of connections among a group of people and things. Social network analysis helps you explore and visualize patterns found within collections of linked entities that include people. From the perspective of social network analysis, the treelike org-chart that commonly represents the hierarchical structure of an organization or enterprise is too simple and lacks important information about the cross connections that exist between and across departments and divisions. In contrast with the simplified tree structure of an org-chart, a social network view of an organization or population leads to the creation of visualizations that resemble maps of highway systems, airline routes, or rail networks Network analysts see the world as a collection of interconnected pieces. Those studying social networks see relationships as the building blocks of the social world, each set of relationships combining to create emergent patterns of connections among people, groups, and things. The focus of social network analysis is between, not within people. Whereas traditional social science research methods such as surveys focus on individuals and their attributes (e.g., gender, age, income), network scientists focus on the connections that bind individuals together, not exclusively on their internal qualities or abilities. This change in focus from attribute data to relational data dramatically affects how data are collected, represented, and analyzed. Social network analysis complements methods that focus more narrowly on individuals, adding a critical dimension that captures the connective tissue of societies and other complex interdependencies. Once a set of social media networks has been constructed and social network measurements have been calculated, the resulting data set can be used for many applications. For example, network data sets can be used to create reports about community health, comparisons of subgroups, and identification of important individuals, as well as in applications that rank, sort, compare, and search for content and experts. The value of a social network approach is the ability to ask and answer questions that are not available to other methods. This means focusing on relationships. Although analysts, marketers, and administrators often track social media participation statistics, they rarely consider relationships. Traditional participation statistics can provide important insights about the engagement of a community, but can say little about the connections between community members. Network analysis can help explain important social phenomena such as group formation, group cohesion, social roles , personal influence, and overall community health. Significance of Research Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic. There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again. If you are selling products/services or just publishing content for ad revenue, social media marketing is a potent method that will make your site profitable over time. (Maki, 2007) Limitations Following are the issues which could be faced during the research: Lack of awareness of utilizing social media among people in Pakistan. No prior research available. DELIVERABLE IV LITERATURE REVIEW Social Media Marketing Social media marketing is the way of promoting your business or sites through different social media channels and it is an effective plan that will surge traffic to your sites, get more links and grasp the attention of people. It is one of the low cost website or product publicity method. It grasps more number of visitors, some of whom may repeatedly visit the website. If you are in a business which deals with selling products or services, then social media marketing is one of the effective ways that will make your site profitable over a period of time. Those who do not know the worth of social media sites fall into three different categories (1) the one who do not anything about social media marketing (2) one who are interested and do not know to use the social media (3)the one who do not have confidence in the worth that a social media marketing can bring in. Why Social Media? Nowadays Blogs are even ranked higher than the static websites because of their relevant content and their fresh thoughts which meet the searches criteria to come on top positions. The more links you have the better your site will be ranked by search engines. When your website receives more natural permanent links, it builds more authenticity of your site and builds search engine trust on your website. This helps to get ranked even with competitive keywords. social media is a essential tool for promoting your site and its really a worthy method to get into fame. (1)Social media marketing helps you to get more natural links to your site and your website is exposed in front of more people which helps yo to drive more traffic on your website. (2)Its a dependable method, if you utilize it properly and successfully, social communities help you to drive traffic more than the previous amount traffic you received from the search engine. (3) Social media marketing is a community based marketing method, and this doesnt harm several other methods that drive traffic to the websites regularly Social media marketing helps to get famous all around the globe. Social media sites includes online communities, social networks, blogs, wikis and another type of media for marketing, sales and customer support.. The different types of social media marketing tools include facebook, orkut, hi5, twitter, Linkedin, blogs, YouTube and Flickr. The social media marketing acts as a cheapeest method of advertising. It is seen that social media marketing acts as one of the leading business venue to use. Nowadays business technology buyers participate more socially to promote their business. Building a attractive website may take more amount of time and efforts. Getting ranked in search engine can take years, in order to build a competitive position. Social media marketing helps you to get huge amount of traffic in a single day. Once you become aware of social media tools the it would be easy for you to grab audience and to satisfy their needs. The fast growth of Social Media Marketing shows the future of internet in social media marketing. The major players in the social media market may revolutionize themselves in course off time and online business peoples also have to change their trends according to it. With social media marketing you can easily compete with the counterparts and attain the end in concern. The Value of Marketing through Social News Websites For those who dont understand or see the value of social media websites, lets take a look at the benefits of creating viral content and effectively promoting them through social media channels. Developing link baits and successfully getting it popular on various social media websites like Digg and StumbleUpon will lead to multiple benefits for any website: Primary and Secondary Traffic. Primary traffic is the large amount of visitors who come directly from social media websites. Secondary traffic is referral traffic from websites which link to and send you visitors, after they come across your content through the social sites. High Quality Links. Becoming popular on social news websites like Digg or Reddit will get you a large number of links, some of which