GO-TO MARKET OPERATIONS AND EXECUTION

These days, social media such as YouTube, FaceBook and Instagram are not foreign to us. Social media can be helpful to us especially when we are about to buy something for the first time as it provides a platform where previous buyers could voice out their experiences or reviews of the purchased products. According to Nielsen (2007), the existence of social media not just allowing companies to promote their business to the society at large at such a low cost, but also aids in creating trust with the audience since there is a lack of trust among customers in most forms of advertisements. This consequently drive business companies to focus more on social media since it is gradually taking control of the brand reputation of companies (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). 

Social media platforms offer opportunities to build value-added content for customers and to monitor negative customer sentiment. On the other hand, there may also be potential harms where companies may be encountering enraged customers who are believed to be value destroyers instead of value creators (Verhoef, Beckers & van Doorn, 2013; Verhoef, Reinartz & Krafft, 2010). Hence, companies are striving on dealing with the social environment as it is with the traditional way companies pursued marketing. According to Verhoef et al. (2013), the effort of interacting with customers through social media may be exposing companies to a weaker control. Companies may be at worrying state as the risks of a lack of control is a lot larger especially for strong brands in particular. For example, there is a risk of customers who use the opportunities to tarnish the companies’ established brand value. Henceforth, companies should be extremely cautious in managing the activities pursued.  

There are a few ways implemented by firms to manage brand health with social media. Firstly, about 49% of the firms created value-added content or services for customers on social media platforms and forums. Furthermore, 44% of the firms supervised brand mentions and sentiments in social media forums and addressing negative messages directly. Next, around 25% of the studied firms recognized influential discussion forums and joining in discussions about the brand while the other 22% of the firms reached out to key online opinion leaders to serve as brand advocates. Finally, an amount of 14% hired a third-party service provider to manage brand interactions in social media and other online forums (Leeflang et al., 2013).