Vladimir Ilic PhD 12
ABSTRACT
Social media represent key tool for communication, connecting and creating relations between people (and brands) in last ten years. In XXI century, tête-â- tête communication has been replaced by virtual, long distance communication. Such a dramatic change in the way we communicate was accompanied by the change of way we think or do business. In following years, we can expect this trend to continue which will lead to social media becoming integral, and a very important, part of any business model. In the meantime, companies need to develop sustainable social media business strategies, which is easier to say than do. Numerous studies showed that majority of companies are facing challenges in designing effective social media strategy and even bigger problems in implementing it. Breakthroughs are necessary in developing tools which will help process data gathered in social media. Only strategies fed with such a quality data can prove to be more superior and secure stable social media business presence.
Key words: New Media, Social Media, Communication, Business JEL Classification: D83, L82
UDC: 658:659.3
11
Ivan Bauer, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia, [email protected]
12
Vladimir Ilic, Faculty of Business Economics and Entrepreneurship, Belgrade, Serbia, [email protected]
INTRODUCTION
The last decade of the XX century has been characterized by the appearance of new media that enabled: New ways of communication between people that opened numerous new possibilities, Gathering and storing knowledge at one place, in virtual space with theoretically unlimited capacity, Availability of countless information to growing number of people. Two new media from the end of XX century, internet and mobile phones, are just the starting point, the introduction to global revolution which, by changing the way we communicate among ourselves (and also as we communicate with brands (broadest definition of brands should be taken in this case, which assumes that brands are not only labels, but also: personalities, political parties, tourist destinations, festivals etc.)), started to change behavior patterns. That (r)evolution, with the occurrence of social media, literally, has exploded in XXI century.
Mobile phones/tablets and social media, so called new media, became cultural, sociological, political and economic phenomena of today! New media change behavior patterns; introduce new culture in the way we communicate and interact; transfer the process of creating, maintaining and breaking social relations into the online world; have growing influence on global politics; and their influence on economics is about to achieve expected proportions.
When someone, in general public, talks about the change in the way people communicate, he refers to, in the majority of situations, new communication tools that we have at our disposal now, but that didn't exist before. Dramatic jumps in technological advance in the last quarter of century made possible things that were, for common people, beyond imagination before that: Availability (for communication) in every single spot on the planet, Access to countless amount of information which are being updated with the latest data in real time, and changed in every second, Building virtual friendships that are gaining equal if not greater importance than meeting people vis-à-vis, Establishing (acknowledged) personal expertise and/or creating personal brand in virtual world...
All these new possibilities wouldn't exist without technological revolution in the field of communications, preceded by breakthroughs in the field of mobile telecommunications and broadband internet. New telecommunication advances made new ways of communication between/with people possible, everywhere and in every moment. That was the ignition for the process that is changing the world around us, changing the way we work, live, communicate, hang out; in one word – this process changes us!
In this new world, world of incredible opportunities for communication, huge amount of space was opened for marketers to act. Appearance of new media, mobile phones and social media, for communication with consumers coincided with the appearance of the phenomenon called advertising overload. Modern world is characterized with the omnipresence of commercials where modern consumer of commercial messages is faced with them in literally every situation in which it is possible. Translated to the language of numbers, it means that average user is exposed
to mass media up to 70% of time when he is available, every day (Newell, 2007, pp.53) Being exposed to mass media, in these days, means being exposed to commercial messages most of the time. That kind of advertising overload leads to consumer's hostility against commercials. That, in next iteration, caused natural reaction – a new phenomenon, called ad avoidance. Our brain's advertising overload, combined with aversion towards commercials that people have built, is of such a huge proportions that, apart from conscious (active) rejection of receiving any kind of commercial messages, our brain has adapted to new environment in such a manner that it independently started to avoid engagement with commercial messages. In other words, brain developed new ability called passive ad avoidance. On figure 1 we can see one of the results of research that showed that XXI century consumer's eye is “trained” so well that it can completely ignore commercial content.
Figuree 1: Passive Ad Avoidance Source: Evans, 2008, pp. 10
Namely, eye movement detection devices, used for this study ("Banner blindness"), produced maps of eye movement during page scans which show that participants in the study were able to very effectively avoid areas recognized as commercial (e.g. undesirable) content. Figure1 shows us that participant's eyes (driven by the back slice of cerebrum) put focus solely on informative content, while all the commercial information were more than successfully avoided.
That makes us think how impossible it is to communicate with modern consumers in traditional manner. In other words, new generations, raised under the influence of new communication media, demand new ways of communication with them by brands/companies. New world which arises, unlike the one we are abandoning, which we can name the world of “black lists” (because consumers of ads refused to communicate with those they didn't want to, e.g. they tended to put them on "black lists"), will be the world of “white lists” in which consumers will choose who they will communicate with, and where the initiators of commercial communication won't be companies anymore, but consumers (Bauer, 2013, pp. 272). The world of traditional media is not like that, and is not able to become that kind of place; it takes new media – social media and mobile phones (tablets), whose growing (inter)connectivity, portability, interdependence make them converge towards one new “supermedia” of the future in which all the possibilities of modern new media will be incorporated, even those not invented yet.
In the meantime, new media usage rates grow incredibly fast, year in, year out. While, at the beginning of XXI century, most of the users of new media lived in the developed countries (North America and Western Europe), in the second decade things have been changing. Unlike developed countries, in which new media usage rates growth is low or stagnates (beacuse these countries are approaching levels of saturation of the market, where there is no more room for growth), in developing countries, which are slowly overtaking leading position, at least when it comes to the growth of number of users and the growth of overall number of users, those rates are extremely high. For example, according to the report of the well-known e-research company, eMarketer, almost half of nearly 2.5 billion users of social networks (which represent a part of social media, in which we include: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn...) live in Asia! The highest penetration rate of social media among internet users is recorded in the Middle East and Africa. Therefore, new media are becoming less and less privilege of the rich, and more of global phenomenon!
It would be logical that dazzling global rise in use of new media (especially among younger people, but more and more among other age groups, as well) is followed by similar rise in usage rates of social media and mobile phones for business. Nevertheless, in practice we face different results! While users tend to almost instantly adopt new possibilities presented by mobile phones and social media, usage rates of new media for business purposes have very slow growth and are not even close to being proportional to their popularity. Reasons for that are countless:
New media represent, for majority of companies, unknown field with new rules, New media have been, for too long, perceived as a “kid toy” because they
were used mostly by younger people,
New media represent communication technique based on extremely fast technological advance and almost instantaneous adoption of new communication tools; that, however, wasn't followed by the adoption of corresponding metrics which is supposed to measure the effectiveness of communication using new media; as a result, we have very attractive space for communication, but with unclear effects of that communication,
Ad hoc approach which characterized sales campaigns of XX century doesn't work in new media; new media demand long-term approach and permanent engagement; even in the case of long-term engagement, there are no guarantees what will be the commercial outcome;
New media “space”, e.g. interaction happening in them, is impossible to control, unlike traditional media where companies/brands/marketers have complete control over the process of communication.
Still, the most important reason for low usage rate of new media for business purposes is the fact that new media carry certain, for users, very important personal note. New media is, in modern world of bombing users with commercial messages, the last space under which they have any type of control and which, for that very reason, has special, almost intimate, status for them. Taking in consideration the well- documented aversion growing number of users has towards ads, it's logical that they will hardly allow commercial content to access that space towards which they have special relation and in which they, even though it's, by its nature, virtual, spend large, and growing, amount of time. Because of the large amount of time that average user spends in new media, in XXI century, those users tend to be overprotective towards that space with special status and they want to have full control over it. Even if they would be willing to give up the control, users would do it only if they get something in return. That way of doing business is, however, completely new and unknown to companies used to one-way communication in which they transmit their messages and don't have to listen to reactions from the “receivers” of their messages.
Obviously, it's necessary that companies/brands establish more “vivid” communication with users of new media in order to reach consensus on the way they communicate because only in that case they can hope that the door to this “protected” space will be opened.