Week 5 Reaction Blog

Over the past few years, social media has had a dramatic effect on many different areas of society as a whole. Business, certainly, has been significantly impacted and changed due to the effects of social media. College professors W. Glynn Mangold and David J. Faulds discuss the effects of social media on business promotion, specifically, in their article for the Kelley School of Business.

The authors point out that internet-based messages have become a major factor in influencing consumer behavior. Consumer behavior is a very significant factor of business and sales. Therefore, those in the marketing and promotions field want to get a grasp on how to best use social media to influence consumer behavior. Achieving this goal will provide a big boost for their business. However, marketing managers have found this difficult because there is very little guidance for using social media in integrated market communications (IMC).

Marketers don't have a choice -- they have to embrace the changes due to social media and can't afford to ignore them. Why? Well, social media is becoming the primary means of communicating and now advertising via social media is more trusted than "traditional elements of the promotion mix." So what can marketers do? Mangold and Faulds point out that conversations through social media are the key for the IMC of businesses. While managers can't directly control those conversations, the authors point out several strategies to help guide those conversations to be most beneficial to a business's marketing.

Among a list of several ideas, Mangold and Faulds argue that providing networking platforms is a vital component of a successful IMC, because the target audience has a place (where the consumers share something in common) to connect. The writers also stress the importance of using many different kinds of social media (including blogs) to maximize promotion efforts.