Chapter 9

Chapter 9 E-commerce---Case study questions

Question 1

Assess the people, organization, and technology issues for using social media to engage with customers.

Nowadays, most people will use the social media to keep in touch with friend and let them know what they recently doing. However, these social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Line can become powerful tools for engaging customers in business for all companies of all shapes and sizes. In addition, location based businesses like gourmet food trucks can tweet their current location to loyal followers and fans. Appointment-based businesses can easily tweet or post cancellations and unexpected openings. Larger companies run sweepstakes and promotions and cn have an opportunity to shape the perception of their brands and to solidify relationships with their customers.

Companies are rolling out ads that capitalize on the social media features of Facebook to achieve greater visibility. For example, Facebook ads feature the ability to ‘Like’ a brand, send a virtual gift, amswer a poll question, or instantly stream information to your news feed. Facebook also allow you to following the fan page of the brand and can get the new feed about the brand or the updates news, promotion, and competition.

Question 2

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using social media for advertising, brand building, market research, and customer service?

Advantages

a)      Companies of all sizes have an opportunity to shape the perception of their brands and to solidify relationships with their customers.

b)      To achieve greater visibility- Facebook ads feature the ability to “like” a brand, give comment, answer poll question, send a virtual gift

c)       To allow customers to socialize and share their purchases with friends through social media

d)      Answer user question and respond to complaints. Companies can easily manage the complaints of products from user and get improvement overall through these application.

e)      Companies uses text mining to gather data and convert then to useful information and uses the information to gauge the success of promotions, which products are hot and which are duds, and the impact of advertising campaigns.

f)       Use social media- Facebook’s targeting capabilities to determine which types of people respond to the various ads it has created.

Disadvantages

a)      The result can be unpredictable, and not always beneficial, as Starbucks learned. Starbucks launched a social media contest, which was essentially a scavenger hunt for advertising posters in Twitter. The campaign backfired. At the urging of anti- Starbucks protesters, users flooded Starbucks’ Twitter feed with pictures of employees and protesters holding signs criticizing Starbucks’ labor practices.

Question 3

Should all    companies use Facebook and Twitter for customer service and advertising? Why or why not? What kinds of companies are best suited to use these platforms?

Yes, companies should use these social media-Facebook and Twitter for customer service and advertising. This is because Facebook and Twitter more effective compare to others. Facebook and Twitter is a social web and have a large amount of people or companies link their business, company products to social media. Companies with selling digital goods like camera, smartphone and so on are suitable to use the platform because social media need be efficiently and good performance with digital products.