Question

Social media and social marketing have become huge players in the marketing process for all E-commerce businesses, or for that matter, any type of business or organization. Social marketing allows a business to reach large numbers of people instantly and at a very low cost. The issue, however, becomes how we measure our performance and our success.

According to Laudon and Traver, there are five steps in the social marketing process (page431). Fan Acquisition uses different means of attracting customers and users to your site. Engagement uses different tools to encourage customers to interact with your site. Amplification encourages users to share what they like and their comments with their friends and others on the site. Community builds a defined group of users who consistently interact with each other on your site. Brand strength is the last of these steps and is the culmination of the first four steps – sales and revenue.

Fan Acquisition--Engagement--amplification--community--Brand Strength(sales)

Once again, imagine you are a consultant hired to help a start-up company develop an E-commerce website. This week, you are working with the social marketing process model. Select two websites of your choice and apply the social marketing process model to both. Prepare a report, approximately 2 pages in length, that covers the points listed below. Use APA style and include a cover page and references page. Your instructor may opt to have you work in teams and to present your report to the class.

• Identify the two sites and provide a link to their home page.
• How well do these sites acquire fans?
• How well do these sites generate engagement?
• How well do these sites amplify responses?
• How well do these sites create a community which should result in brand strength?
• Make one recommendation for each site to improve their effectiveness.

Answer 1

The two e-commerce sites are Amazon and Jabong.

www.amazon.com

www.jabong.com

In order to acquire fans, the websites have attractive promotional offers which offer products at a substantially low price. Moreover, they have got tie-up with Google to act as an advertising platform which would direct the potential customers to the online websites to make purchasing.

In order to generate engagement, there is a star rating for all the products displayed on the website. Based on the past purchase behavior, the promotional messages are being sent to the target customers. The customers see the product ratings, go through the promotional messages and get engaged with their favorite vendors based on their tastes and preferences. The messages sent are personalized targeting the customers by their first name and thus engaging them.

In order to amplify responses, the the customers are allowed to share the reviews and product information with their friends using the online platform.

These sites provide a platform to link through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest thus creating an online community of the like minded people who can share the reviews amongst themselves.

In order to improve the effectiveness, online e-commerce sites should focus only on personalised and customised marketing instead of mass marketing which would be more effective and economic to the company.