CHAPTER 2

#Going_Social

In this chapter you will read:

    •  Why SoLoMo consumers are social

    •  Their characteristics of social behavior

    •  About new trends in social engagement such as social search, visual search, content marketing, and social commerce

    •  How Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram function as entry points to purchase

    •  About social entertainment as expressed by the YouTube community, product reviews, home videos, song covers, thumbs up, thumbs down, likes, and dislikes

    •  How to use collective coupons from deal sites (i.e., Groupon)

    •  How to seek recommendations through social networks

    •  A case analysis

Introduction

AdWeek provides an introduction that underlines the inescapable importance of social media as a part of a marketing process.

This chapter introduces the nature of social media marketing from start to finish, in terms of identifying the social nature of consumers in the SoLoMo environment. If there is one hallmark of the social landscape, it is that it is both diverse and fast moving. This chapter examines a plethora of ways that social media has been used to engage customers and how most of that is still very new. The chapter not only introduces all of the different methods in and of themselves, but also gives a sense of best practice by examining the social media approach of the Checkers burger chain. The takeaways for this chapter are that social media is an extremely cost-effective, flexible, and rich way of marketing to customers if approached in the right way, and is the bedrock of a SoLoMo approach.

SoLoMo Consumers Are Social

The growth of the SoLoMo consumer has changed the dynamics of product marketing beyond recognition (Doyle, 2012). The fundamental means by which brands send and receive information, the way that customers make purchasing decisions and find out about products or services, is now completely different.

The main shift has been the change in the information flow dynamic between brand and customer. Before the advent of social marketing, there was a fairly distinct process that most brands went through when marketing a product or service. The first step in the process was to conduct some market research about potential customers, their wants and needs, previous purchasing habits, and so forth. This then allowed the brand to segment their marketing strategy depending on the customers they wanted to talk to and their selected method of engagement. They would then design some marketing collateral to achieve that aim, whether it can be by TV, radio, print advertisement, or whatever. The key is that the brand is in control of the marketing process at all times.

SoLoMo has changed that completely; the brand is not in control of the process, but is merely a participant in a wider array of information sharing and exchange that now determines how people make the decision to buy something (Tuten and Solomon, 2014). There is exceptionally clear evidence to show that people use social engagement to seek recommendations and feedback on brands from people whom they trust, friends or other people in their personal networks whose opinions they trust or believe to be a neutral arbiter. Therefore, people will ask their Facebook friends for recommendations on their purchases, or whether someone has had a good or bad experience at a particular restaurant, for example. Sometimes this is quite passive; someone might simply read that someone has had a great night at a new restaurant, and decide to check it out themselves.

As a wider element of social engagement, websites like TripAdvisor or feedback systems such as those found on eBay have become important parts of the marketing mix. These systems are built around user-generated reviews of products and services, and consumers tend to place a good deal of store in the information that they get from them. Therefore, no marketer can ignore this kind of social engagement and reflexive feedback in their plans. Fundamentally the dynamic has changed so that consumers may now know more about products and services than the marketers themselves; they have the capability to compare and contrast multiple providers very easily, and with no input from the brands themselves.

This means a couple of things for marketers, broadly speaking positive and negative. The positive thing is that consumers can often become very powerful advocates for the brand, much more powerful than the brand itself could be, because they enjoy a level of trust among consumers (Kamins, 2014). Therefore, having a positive engagement strategy that tries to make the most of this—without forcing it—can be extremely powerful. The downside is that if consumers become unhappy with some element of the service, they can amplify their discontent a long way beyond themselves and can cause substantial damage to a brand.

Return on Investment

What really makes SoLoMo sing is the ROI—return on investment. Under traditional advertising models success of a particular campaign is directly correlated to the amount of money put into it. Any form of traditional marketing, be it TV, radio, printed ads, or billboards, requires substantial upfront cost, sometimes many millions of dollars. Moreover, there is no real way of linking that upfront cost to the number of sales derived from it; the ads cost what they cost, and then it is up to the company to make the most of any leads it generates. Social media advertising and particularly SoLoMo have changed that completely (Buhalis and Mamalakis, 2015).

Start-up costs for social media advertising are negligible. The infrastructure is provided by a third party, for example, Facebook, Foursquare, or Twitter, and often it is possible to set up a presence there at no cost at all; there’s no charge for setting up a Facebook page or Twitter account. From then, the company can either grow their social media presence organically—at no cost—or use various promoted adverts. Even if they decided to use paid advertising, the cost is directly linked to engagement and the budgets are customizable. In the case of SoLoMo there is often no need to pay for any adverts; the key is in appearing in local search results and similar social offerings, which are part of the essential offer of the social networks anyway. What all of this adds up to is that even the smallest venture can have a widespread social media presence and practice SoLoMo marketing without a huge budget. It is a game changer for many small businesses, because they play on the same basic playing field as larger brands so they can compete more equally (Chan and Yazdanifard, 2014).

Aside from the low cost, what really makes the value of social marketing is the metrics. If you buy an advert in a local newspaper, there are very few metrics that can tell you much about what consumers thought when they saw about it: a general circulation figure of the newspaper, and the number of people who actually contact you as a result. With social media there are huge numbers of metrics available, ranging from basic statistics such as who has seen your page to has actually interacted with it in some way, through geographical overlays of visitors and analytics on how your visitors are connected to other visitors. This means that it is possible to optimize social marketing in a way that is simply impossible with other forms of engagement; and again for small businesses, that kind of data used to be restricted only to big companies (Hoffman and Fodor, 2010). This is a real leveler in marketing terms.

SoLoMo: Now!

What makes this so important for you to engage with now? While it might seem as though all of the techniques of SoLoMo mentioned in this chapter have already been put to work by competitors, we are really only at the beginning of a much larger trend. The technologies that underpin the mobile and social networking elements of SoLoMo are only a couple of years old and people are still figuring out how best to use them. More importantly, people are only now beginning to get enough data on SoLoMo consumer behavior to get an early indication of how consumers are really working with SoLoMo principles. Much of what has been written previously has been based on observations and anecdotes rather than sustained data analysis. As this trend continues to emerge into the future, data analytics and performance trends will become clearer. However, these trends are also being pushed forward by deep technological trends. The rise of the mobile device may give way to wearable tech, and that may have profound changes on the way that people use the SoLoMo principle. It is a fast-moving landscape that marketers need to be constantly monitoring in order to ensure that they are moving in tandem with it.

All of this means that now is the time to build the SoLoMo marketing team in your business, before you get left behind. The conditions are ripe to make the most of the SoLoMo now; the early pioneers have made their mistakes and pointed to the right directions to take, but thier trend as a whole has so much further to go.

New trends in Social Engagement

Social Search

Clearly, in order to make the best out of this social landscape and to use the amplification of social endorsements it is helpful for marketers to have some understanding of how people are connected. There are a several large social networking sites and applications, with many people registered on all of them, and it can be quite difficult being systematic in how to engage with a particular demographic through all of these connections.

Facebook has provided a social search function to developers called the Facebook Social Graph, which is the largest social dataset in the world. Because Facebook is the largest social network in the world, with nearly a billion members, it is in a unique position to track the way that people are connected on different websites and how they use the web (Evans, 2012). This graphs out defined relationships among not just people but other objects such as photographs across websites, so marketers can understand the kinds of webs of relationships that exist and what the potential consequences in engagement are. Google has attempted to create a similar service, though with less success.

The advantage is that marketers can use this to gain a very high-level understanding of the networks that their customers are involved in, and this might open up new opportunities for engagement and expanding reach. It provides a context for all of the other more particular marketing actions that follow, and a loose form of modeling the potential reach.

Content Marketing

One of the interesting behavioral characteristics of social marketing is that customers do not actually respond well to what might be called traditional advertisements, specific advert panels, banners, or text ads that are overlaid on the page; an even worse sin is the pop-up or pop-under advert, as these have largely died out and have little presence in social media. There are various theories advanced for this, but the crux of the matter is that they interfere with the user experience and particularly with the interactions that the consumer is trying to complete with their networks.

Marketers have found a more subtle way of getting their messages through to consumers with the idea of content marketing. This is where content is produced that is designed to look like native content on whatever service the consumer is using. The idea is taken from newspapers, where advertisers often draft adverts to look like the regular editorial content of the paper. The object of the exercise is not to deceive readers as such, but rather to get past their normal defense mechanisms around adverts; once the reader has become engaged by the content then he or she tends to continue reading even as he or she realizes that it is advertising content. Many of you will probably have come across such content at the end of a news article or a blog, where there is a selection of links to “promoted content” or “promoted articles,” some with quite unusual headlines.

Deals and Coupons

Deals and coupon sites have had something of a tumultuous ride over the last few years, and in the process have garnered a lot of negative press, but there are still many valid reasons for using such sites as part of a wider social marketing strategy. The key site in this area is Groupon, but there are a number of regional and local sites that need to be considered when working within the SoLoMo principle, but the general principle holds true.

The essential idea of a coupon site is that local businesses can offer a discounted coupon and leverage the traffic of the coupon website to drive their own traffic. This can work particularly well for physical businesses that need to drive people to an actual physical location. The sites initially worked well, but then lost popularity as the fees involved made the transaction unprofitable for coupon issuer and often resulted in disappointed customers when special offers ran out. However, there remain interesting elements of the model that can still be used.

Whatever the short-term profitability of using a coupon service, they remain a very powerful way of generating initial interest in a product or service; the start-up costs of a coupon campaign are relatively modest, and they can generate a lot of traffic very quickly. For those who are looking to create initial exposure for a product or service it can be a very useful tool. Moreover, from the perspective of social marketers, coupons are often very widely shared on social media among certain demographics so the exposure benefits can be greatly amplified even among those who do not necessarily use the coupon itself.

New Behaviors in Social Media

Seeking Recommendations through Social Networks

There is a burgeoning trend in consumers becoming producers in many ways, and creating their own marketing platforms through their own social media and online platforms. There is an increasing trend in people seeking out subscribers, favorites, or followers on whatever platform they have to build their own following; often this is not directly about marketing a product but about building their particular following within a community. Often people can generate very substantial presence within a community, which is very interesting to online marketers.

A good example of this is the world of competitive video gaming. Top players routinely build Twitter and YouTube followers of over 500,000 people, who watch them play and compete in big money tournaments for games such as World of Warcraft, Pro Evolution Soccer, or Fifa. One of the things that brands have sought to do is get these people with large social “capital” to provide direct or subtle endorsements of their products. In the example of competitive gaming, handset manufacturers, seat makers, and headphone designers give freebies to people with large YouTube and streaming followers, so that they are giving implicit endorsements of the products that then encourage their followers to emulate them.

Using Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as Entry Points to Purchase

Social media has proven a very fertile space to revisit some old tropes in marketing, as it offers a level of engagement that reinvigorates them. Many marketers use the idea of competitions and giveaways on social media as a way of generating an entry point to a purchase; so there is some incentive to engage with the brand. Many of these competitions or giveaways are contingent on some form of purchase, or offer a teaser that should then lead to purchase. The ability to engage with people in an interactive way on social media, and to have a bit of back and forth with them, makes them work very well, as does the limited cost of getting set up in this space.

Embracing the YouTube Community

YouTube has proved an interesting avenue for marketers in general, because videos allow for a multisensory engagement with the user, and they can generally hold the attention of the viewer much longer than other forms of advertisement. The videos themselves can be put to different uses depending on exactly what the marketer is trying to sell, and they can be used either for direct marketing purposes such as product videos or third-party endorsements or some combination thereof. This is best illustrated through a number of examples.

To return to the idea of the competitive gaming industry, many of the top gamers do product review videos or something very similar, such as reviewing their own personal gaming setup, with the intention of promoting certain products. This has worked very well for brands such as BenQ, maker of gaming monitors, as well as Scuf, a maker of bespoke gaming controllers. There are a number of videos on YouTube where players talk through their gaming setup or their championship setup, extolling the technical virtues of these products. Naturally there are many of their fans and aspiring gamers who take note of these videos and buy the same products in order to try and emulate their heroes.

There are also many independent review videos that are popular on YouTube. These people review products or services in a particular niche and give their feedback. The advantage to marketers is twofold; the first is that the cost of collaborating on review video that could accomplish over one million views in a month is a fraction of producing a traditional advertising medium such as a TV spot. Moreover, consumers tend to trust the reviews that they say through these channels because they view them as independent of the brands themselves, and therefore giving honest feedback. With many products and services a video actually allows people to see whatever they are thinking about purchasing in action, which often makes people feel more comfortable with a new thing. It reassures them particularly about whether it does what they think it does, and that it is good value for money.

There are slightly more subtle ways of using YouTube videos to market products. Some marketers have experimented with the idea of spoof cover songs or interview pieces, whereby the putative inventor of something or the “face” of a brand gives an endorsement through the course of an interview. A good example of this is the YouTube campaign that Nestle developed for their Nescafe brand of coffee. They developed a series of YouTube short video adverts that featured a panel discussion with one of their ambassadors George Clooney talking about their social and environmental credentials, and talking up what a sustainable brand Nescafe was. There was never any particular offer during the video, or call to action; it was merely a piece of marketing aiming to fit in with the values of people demographically profiled as likely to view the video which it prefaced.

Social Entertainment

An extension of the idea of these kind of videos is the idea of social entertainment; companies are now developing levels of engagement with their customers through such things as creating games for them to play on their Facebook page. Clearly, there is some distance between playing a game and actually purchasing something from the brand, but the idea is to engage with the customer through something that they enjoy doing and associate with positive thoughts; this then transfers to an extent to the brand. It moves the brand toward a trusted status with people, and makes them more willing to engage with the more direct elements of the marketing plan.

There are other forms of social entertainment such as live video streaming sessions that invite the participation of viewers. To return once again to professional gamers, many have built up larger followers on the sites MLG or Twitch which allow people to watch them play, with an inset screen of the gamer themselves, alongside such features as interactive chatting with the gamers. The gamers physically talk to people in the chat section as they play, giving the whole thing a very interactive feel to it. Typically these gamers now punctuate the play with advertisement breaks that take over the stream for a few seconds, which commercializes what started out as a leisure activity. In addition the stream feeds are overlaid with product promotions. Therefore, the consumers are primarily there for the purposes of entertainment and interacting with their heroes, but it all offers a seamless way of advertising.

Steps Your Business Should Take to Leverage Social Media

The SoLoMo revolution is only in its infancy, so companies and their marketers really need to position themselves for the future right now. There is no right or wrong answer for SoLoMo; it depends on what you are trying to sell and to whom, but there are a couple of things that you can do no matter what industry you are in. You have to set up the right relationship with your customer from the very start; customer experience is the thing that will separate the winners from the losers.

Set up Social Media

It may seem a startlingly obvious thing to say, but it is necessary to sign up to all the social media sites and set each of them up correctly. This can take some time, particularly for those who don’t use them personally, but it is worth it. The simple fact is that it is quite likely that consumers are talking about your company, or searching for similar services on social networks, and so it is not really supportable to not involve yourself.

After making the decision to sign up to all of these sites, it is then subsequently necessary to actually manage the social media profiles correctly. There is nothing more off-putting to a potential customer than seeing a social media page that hasn’t been updated for 6 months; it suggests a lack of care and a lack of interest in customers. It looks even worse when there are questions or comments from customers that have gone unanswered.

Aside from keeping social media profiles up to date, one of the major management tasks is responding to customer comments, particularly negative ones. A lot of people who run their own business find this a particularly difficult task, because they take the criticism personally and find the customers unreasonable. However, it is an essential task and one that needs to be managed professionally no matter what the size of the company. Generally speaking, the best way of doing this is to have a written policy for engaging with customers that can ensure that everybody knows exactly what to do.

Optimize Websites

It is incredible to say it, but there are still many brands that have a website that is not optimized for mobile devices. Websites that are not responsive to the type of device that they are displayed on, and designed around the strictures of mobile page size and touch screen browsing, are putting customers off in their droves, and their owners probably don’t even know it. Opening up a clunky, difficult-to-navigate website on a smartphone is a terrible beginning to the customer experience, and it is very unlikely that it can be recovered.

Therefore, all websites need to be optimized for mobile. The process need not be expensive, because any newly designed web presence will be tailored for mobile, but it is an essential investment. The mobile optimization process might take a little time to complete, since it needs to be very refined around what information customers feed back to you about their site experience. As with any good web design process there should be a culture of testing and refinement based on user data; the opening paragraphs of this chapter noted that the SoLoMo trends is only in its infancy and there will be many changes still to come, so marketers need to be ready to move with this trend.

Design Apps

As important as optimizing websites for mobile users is, it is more important to recognize that most SoLoMo users do most of their browsing through smartphone apps rather than websites per se. According to a recent survey-based report from Forrester Research as mentioned by Sterling (2015), US and UK smartphone owners “use an average of 24 apps per month but spend more than 80 percent of their [in app] time on just five apps.” Whether or not it is literally five, this is directionally correct; consumer app time is concentrated in just a few popular apps. According to the Forrester survey data, which come from a mix of behavioral tracking and self-reporting, Facebook and Google are neck and neck for most mobile-user attention. As it has for some time Facebook owns the top spot, but overall Google is slightly ahead of Facebook given aggregate time spent across Google’s portfolio of apps.

Thus, the inescapable conclusion of this is that it is necessary to develop a smartphone app to run on both iOS and Android to ensure that your potential customers can access your business in their preferred manner. This need not break the bank or be overly complicated; app design costs have come down substantially since smartphones were first introduced, so there is no need for an enormous development budget to get something available, and it is essential.

Many companies eschew having an app because they aren’t sure what it would do differently to their mobile website, but that is really to miss the point. If you look at many of the most popular apps such as eBay, Twitter, GoogleMail, or Amazon, they do very little that is fundamentally different to their mobile website; there might be the odd trick based on the technical capabilities of the phone itself but nothing central to the point of the app. The reason that apps have been developed is that this is the way that users want to experience the service; apps are a little neater than websites, and they can sync in nicely with things like cameras and photo albums. Consider this:

The Potential of Apps

Those who think they don’t need a native mobile app because their site is mobile friendly are missing the huge potential apps have over websites.

With a relentless focus on customer experience there is no excuse for not having an app. Apps have an advantage in that it is possible to get better quality analytics from it, because it is essentially a closed environment. Furthermore, the fact that their look and feel is more customizable than a website means it is possible to really polish the user experience and that can really improve engagement with customers. Often the difference between a successful customer experience and a failed one is the last few percent of optimization and testing, not a completely different approach to design (Balakrishnan et al., 2014).

Deals

One of the more difficult elements of marketing in the SoLoMo environment is that it can be quite difficult to get continued engagement from customers; there are so many brands competing in the space, with so many quirky tricks that are trying to attract customers it can be quite difficult to keep customers once you have found them. Too many marketers make the mistake of thinking that acquiring a customer once is the hard part, when in fact keeping them coming back is the real challenge.

Obviously a great user experience and great customer service are the cornerstones of this, but having a system of carefully selected and promoted deals also work very well. There’s a number of ways that this can be incorporated into a SoLoMo environment, but broadly speaking it is possible to overlay deals when someone checks in using a social media service. So, for example, if someone were to check in to a restaurant on FourSquare, then they could immediately be offered a 10% discount or a free extra; if someone checks in at a venue on Facebook, they can receive a free upgrade. The possibilities are endless, but the key is that people will know that they need to check in via social media wherever they are in order to access their special offer.

This fulfills all of the SoLoMo criteria; the check-in is through social media; it is localized to a particular venue, and it will almost certainly be done through a mobile device. This is hugely important for marketers, because it ensures that people keep coming back to them on social media sites. One of the key social media metrics is customer churn in engagement; so how many people unsubscribe, unlike, or unfollow a brand over time. Using this kind of deal-based-engagement strategy means that people have to stay somewhat engaged with the brand on social media, affording many other marketing opportunities to them. The check-in approach usually also reveals a large amount of information about the user, such as their essential personal details, previous check-ins, friends, activity, and so on. All of this can be put to the use of the marketer.

Case Study

Checkers (www.checkers.com) (and sister brand Rally’s) are the largest operator of double drive-in burger restaurants in the United States. They focus on a fast-food offering of high-quality hamburgers, French fries, milkshakes, and hot dogs. They work the SoLoMo principle in a number of different ways depending on the service, but it has contributed in large part to them being one of the fastest growing fast-food chains in the county with over 700 outlets. Their marketing requirements are quite complex because, although in theory they have the same menu in all of their fast-food restaurants, they need to accommodate the requirements of all of their franchisees; not all restaurants might be participating a particular offer item. Furthermore, they are in a fiercely competitive market and they need to be able to develop a rapport with customers beyond that of other local eateries wherever they have a presence.

Mobile Site and Application

Checkers has both a mobile-optimized website and an app available on Google and Android. Both of these are extremely simple, because they are geared almost entirely around helping the user find their nearest branch. On both services the GPS beacon of the site is used, or a zip code, to push the user toward their closest branch. There are a few other elements to the mobile site and app such as the menu, but they are not designed to be engagement tools on their own. Interestingly they do contain links to all of the social media properties of the company.

Facebook

Checkers adopt an innovative strategy for their Facebook marketing because they operate independent pages for each of their stores rather than one page for the whole group. They do this so that people can engage with the store that is closest to them usually, or they can check in to an individual branch of Checkers. The individual pages are used to market special offers from each store.

From the point of view of Checkers and their individual franchisees this is an extremely cost-effective form of marketing. The capture above shows a typical restaurant that has almost 2,000 people who like the page for that restaurant, and then have the special offers visible on the page placed into their regular Facebook timeline. There are almost no other means by which an individual franchisee could regularly target the same 2,000 people whom they know quite a lot about, and whom they know are geographically very proximate to their branch. Furthermore, the high rating of the restaurant by those 2,000 “likers” (4 out of 5 stars) is visible very prominently on the page, and gives the restaurant a large degree of trust among potential new customers. These rating are given by customers rather than the company itself, and they can have a dramatic effect on the visitor rate of the company. What is really important to understand is that the SoLoMo principle has allowed this kind of engagement to be achieved for a single franchise of a much larger chain. This kind of hypertargeted marketing based on location and social media is the hallmark of the new age of online marketing.

FourSquare

As a company Checkers has used FourSquare as a core pillar of its SoLoMo marketing, at the group level rather than individual franchisees. They have set up a special offer whereby people who check in regularly receive a special free gift—at the time of writing they get a free shake on every third check-in—and they have advanced bonuses for people who check in the most; those who become the “Mayor” of a Checkers branch through being the person who has checked in the most at that branch gets a free small shake on every visit. This, again, is a quintessential example of SoLoMo marketing. It is social because it can only be activated through a third-party social media app; it is local because it is aggregated around visits to individual locations, and it is mobile because the check-ins can only be completed via a mobile device.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the rewards are structured around regular social media interactions. One-off check-ins won’t achieve very much for the customer, because they don’t achieve very much for Checkers. Checkers wants to get people into the habit of regular engagement with the company on social media, so its FourSquare strategy is built around engendering that repeated local interaction with the company.

Twitter

The company uses Twitter in a different way to its other social media platforms, but in a very intelligent way. There are a smattering of special offers and promotional tweets, but in the main the twitter feed is used for engaging with customers, in one of two ways. First, the company is very proactive in responding to customer questions through the Twitter feed—restaurant openings, queries about ingredients, customer service comments, product enquiries, and so on. The second is that the company likes to “retweet” and otherwise share the tweets of customers at individual locations.

Thus, they engender a level of engagement with people through the SoLoMo principle. People use their smartphone to take a picture of what they are eating and where, and then this is often retweeted or replied to by the company as a whole. This combines all of the elements of local, mobile, and social and gives the company a friendly, approachable demeanor in the eyes of its customers.

Summary

Checkers give a very good example of how to use the SoLoMo principle as part of a customer acquisition and engagement strategy. The sections above noted how they used various social media platforms to promote sustained engagement with their brands through localized special offers and promotions. Each individual component of the SoLoMo approach that Checkers use is relatively self-explanatory, but it is worth reflecting on the strategy as a whole.

The social media campaign as a whole is very well planned because the purpose of each social platform is very well thought out. They haven’t simply established a presence on each social media platform and then dealt with whatever comes their way through it, they have a specific purpose for every single one of the social media platforms that they use. Twitter is for customer questions and engagement, Facebook localizes the offers to specific groups, FourSquare drives regular social media check-ins, and the mobile app and website drive people to the stores. In many ways this is the key lesson of the Checkers example to take forward into a SoLoMo practice of your own.

There are bewildering array of social media platforms and a bewildering array of different approaches to them. In that lies a danger; there is a risk that brands simply sign up to every social media platform around with no clear vision of what they are trying to achieve from them all, or whether they actually fit in with a SoLoMo strategy. In order to make a SoLoMo strategy work, or indeed any social media strategy, there needs to be a very clear rationale behind every single platform in use (Motameni and Nordstrom, 2014). As Checkers show, if this is done correctly it can be a hugely powerful way of marketing particularly when considered from the perspective of return on investment (Armstrong et al., 2014).

Conclusion

This chapter has demonstrated what social marketing means in terms of SoLoMo and ways of engaging customers. This chapter has covered a lot of different topics aimed at introduced various mechanisms of engagement that have been used in social media marketing ranging from coupons to video endorsements. Not all of these topics will be relevant to every single reader or every single industry sector, but it is important to have a very good understanding of how social media has been used to engage with customers so that you can choose the right mode for your circumstances.

The chapter demonstrated some social media best practice from the Checkers burger chain, and noted how that linked in to their SoLoMo campaign. The Checkers example underlined a number of key lessons for the chapter as a whole to be taken into the following chapters on more applied topics. The first is that while there are many routes to social engagement it is necessary to have a plan for how they will all come together in a social marketing campaign. Second is that it is not sufficient to simply sign up to social media sites; there has to be a commitment and management practice involved in keeping them all up to date.

Most importantly, this chapter has underlined how fast moving this social media marketing space is, and how one of the key challenges is keeping up to date with all of the different strands as they evolve. The only certain thing is that marketers cannot sit on the sidelines and watch, they need to become involved in all of this and make social a core part of their customer engagement and marketing approach.