دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله استفاده از رسانه های اجتماعی در بازاریابی صنعتی و نام تجاری (نشریه Uhra 2012)

استفاده از رسانه های اجتماعی در بازاریابی صنعتی و نام تجاری: مطالعه کاوشی

The Use Of Social Media In B2b Marketing And Branding: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

While the tools of social media are ubiquitous in contemporary consumer marketing, there is little evidence about the extent to which they have been adopted by business-to-business marketers. Although experts argue that B2B firms can and should use platforms such as FaceBook and YouTube, almost all of the popular examples used in mainstream seminars, conferences and the practitioner press are of consumer brands. Our exploratory study used content analysis and text-mining to look at current B2B marketing practitioner literature on the subject, and examined ten large B2B technology companies to profile their use of social media. We found that although large companies were extensive users of almost all the mainstream social media channels, the adoption of these tools was by no means universal. It seems that USbased firms are the furthest ahead in using social media for B2B marketing. The B2B social media pioneers are striving to use these tools to position themselves as ‘thought leaders’, to take a market-driving role in the sector and to build relationships with a range of stakeholder groups.

1 Introduction

Business-to-business marketers have been using Internet applications widely for several years now (Leek, Turnbull & Naude 2003), and there is an extensive body of knowledge around the use of web-based branding in the sector. However, the web has moved on: what was largely didactic, one-way computer-mediated communication has now changed with the evolution of social media platforms and what have been termed Web 2.0 applications. Constantinides and Fountain (2008: 231) defined Web 2.0 as “a collection of open-source, interactive and usercontrolled online applications expanding the experiences, knowledge and market power of the users as participants in business and social processes… [supporting] the creation of informal users’ networks facilitating the flow of ideas and knowledge by allowing the efficient generation, dissemination, sharing and editing/refining of informational content.” At the time of writing the most successful example of this type of thinking is the social networking site FaceBook, a media phenomenon that is widely discussed in terms of the speed of its adoption and the sheer breadth of its reach. Marketers of consumer goods and services, particularly of products targeted at younger age groups, have had no option but to develop social media marketing strategies, because their target audience spends a great deal of time online, interacting with friends and family through such media. Consequently, consumer marketing is now a highly visible part of what is being described as the social media revolution – examples abound, but the Coca Cola FaceBook presence is a highly regarded example (www.facebook.com/cocacola). Where once a company of this importance would have directed audiences from conventional advertising channels towards corporate web pages, it now highlights the FaceBook URL instead, recognizing perhaps that this is the space inhabited by its most attractive target markets. Business-to-business marketers have to decide whether, and how, to employ such media, both those purpose-built for business professionals (such as LinkedIn) and more generic media (such as FaceBook and Twitter), in their branding strategies. In this exploratory study we focused on the technology sector for evidence of how business-tobusiness companies have engaged with social media. We narrowed our focus to firms operating in the information technology sector only. There were some sound reasons for doing this: firstly it meant we were comparing organizations all working in the same dynamic business environment; secondly because technology companies such as Oracle and Cisco have themselves spearheaded new Web 2.0 business models (see for example Tapscott and Williams 2006), as well as enabling the whole social media phenomenon to develop through incremental improvements in connectivity; and thirdly because of the widely-shared belief in this huge sector that social media are of relevance only to consumer brands. This latter point is made plainly in the lists of case studies and industry speakers in almost all industry conferences on social media. Similarly, while Agresta and Bough’s authoritative work on social media marketing (2011: 58- 61) makes the point that B2B companies can and do use social media tools, their focus is almost entirely on B2C. Related points had made by Weber (2007), who drew on examples including Oracle, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and Dell.