“Social media has fundamentally changed the way marketers and consumers interact,” says Dr Jason Roos, Assistant Professor in RSM’s Department of Marketing Management. “While most companies understand this, very few know how to use these new tools to their and their customers' mutual advantage,” he says.
Participants of the open programme Engaging Customers through Social Media will explore the latest research findings about how and why consumers interact with brands through social media, and how to design content that is engaging and shareable. Professionals will also learn that interacting with customers through social media often means giving up some control over their message, which is actually a good thing in many cases, according to Dr Roos. He explains that consumers trust each other more than they trust marketers. “Messages coming from consumers have the potential to be more impactful with other consumers,” he says.
Managing social media
The role of social media in marketing activities keeps increasing. Yet, Dr Roos says companies spend about 10 per cent of their budgets on social media, and that number is increasing by about a third every year. “Most of the budget is spent on what we would traditionally consider marketing communications and advertising,” he says, adding that many companies are now doing more.
Internet of things
“Organisations are using social media to manage their customer and sales support channels or building social features into products that we wouldn't normally think of as ‘social’,” he says. For example, health monitoring devices, such as the Nike+ FuelBand, can be set to share health information via social media. Also, the so-called "internet of things” devices respond to social media activities: Bos Ice Tea created a vending machine that gave out free drinks when people in close physical proximity sent tweets with a particular hash tag.
Dr Roos says that about half of all companies that use social media as part of their marketing activities claim to have only a vague sense of whether their efforts are even beneficial to their brand. “A brand manager who can apply what we've learned about how customers, brands, and communities interact through social media will be at a huge advantage.”
The English-taught programme is part of RSM Executive Education’s portfolio of marketing programmes for professionals. The first run of Engaging Customers through Social Media is scheduled to take place in September 2015.
