Ten pieces of advice for companies deciding to use Social Media

Social networking sites

Social networking sites are applications that enable users to connect by creating personal information profiles, inviting friends and colleagues to have access to those profiles, and sending e-mails and instant messages between each other. These personal profiles can include any type of information, including photos, video, audio files, and blogs. According to Wikipedia, the largest social networking sites are U.S.-based Facebook (initially founded by Mark Zuckerberg to stay in touch with his fellow students from Harvard University) and MySpace (with 1,500 employees and more than 250 million registered users). Social networking sites are of such high popularity, specifically among younger Internet users, that the term “Facebook addict” has been included in the Urban Dictionary, a collaborative project focused on developing a slang dictionary for the English language. Several companies are already using social networking sites to support the creation of brand communities (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001) or for marketing research in the context of netnography (Kozinets, 2002). To promote the movie “Fred Claus,” a 2007 Christmas comedy film, Warner Brothers created a Facebook profile via which visitors could watch trailers, download graphics, and play games. Likewise, the Adidas custom soccer community on MySpace allows visitors to associate themselves with one of two brands of elite soccer cleats produced by the German sports apparel manufacturer, and to access product reviews and information on professional soccer players who play using “their” shoes. Some firms even go one step further and use Facebook as a distribution channel. Consider U.S.-based florist 1-800-Flowers.com, which offers a widget on Facebook called “Gimme Love” whereby users can send “virtual bouquets” to friends or, with a click of the mouse, be directly transferred to the company's website to send real flowers.

Virtual game worlds

Virtual worlds are platforms that replicate a three-dimensional environment in which users can appear in the form of personalized avatars and interact with each other as they would in real life. In this sense, virtual worlds are probably the ultimate manifestation of Social Media, as they provide the highest level of social presence and media richness of all applications discussed thus far. Virtual worlds come in two forms. The first, virtual game worlds, require their users to behave according to strict rules in the context of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). These applications have gained popularity in recent years, as standard game consoles—such as Microsoft's X-Box and Sony's PlayStation—now allow simultaneous play among a multitude of users around the globe. Examples of virtual game worlds include the cod-medieval “World of Warcraft,” which counts around 8.5 million subscribers who explore the virtual planet of Azeroth in the form of humans, dwarves, orcs, or night elves, to fight monsters or to search for treasure; and Sony's EverQuest, in which 16 different races of players (e.g., wizards, clerics) travel the fantasy world of Norrath. The rules of such games usually limit the degree of self-presentation and self-disclosure possible, although some users spend so much time with these applications that their character—be it a warrior, a wizard, or a dragon hunter—starts to more and more closely resemble their real life personality. Besides their use for in-game advertising (similar in idea to product placement in blockbuster movies), the high popularity of virtual game worlds can also be leveraged in more traditional communication campaigns. Japanese automotive giant Toyota, for example, used pictures and mechanics from the World of Warcraft application in its latest Tundra commercial to reach the 2.5 million players in the U.S. alone.

Virtual social worlds

The second group of virtual worlds, often referred to as virtual social worlds, allows inhabitants to choose their behavior more freely and essentially live a virtual life similar to their real life. As in virtual game worlds, virtual social world users appear in the form of avatars and interact in a three-dimensional virtual environment; however, in this realm, there are no rules restricting the range of possible interactions, except for basic physical laws such as gravity. This allows for an unlimited range of self presentation strategies, and it has been shown that with increasing usage intensity and consumption experience, users of virtual social worlds—or “residents,” as they prefer to be called—show behavior that more and more closely mirrors the one observed in real life settings (Haenlein and Kaplan, 2009, Kaplan and Haenlein, 2009a and Kaplan and Haenlein, 2009b). Arguably, the most prominent example of virtual social worlds is the Second Life application, founded and managed by the San Francisco-based company Linden Research Inc. Besides doing everything that is possible in real life (e.g., speaking to other avatars, taking a walk, enjoying the virtual sunshine), Second Life also allows users to create content (e.g., to design virtual clothing or furniture items) and to sell this content to others in exchange for Linden Dollars, a virtual currency traded against the U.S. Dollar on the Second Life Exchange. Some residents are so successful in this task that the virtual money earned that way complements their real life income. Virtual social worlds offer a multitude of opportunities for companies in marketing (advertising/communication, virtual product sales/v-Commerce, marketing research), and human resource and internal process management; for a more detailed discussion, see Kaplan and Haenlein (2009c).

Ten pieces of advice for companies deciding to use Social Media

Social Media is a very active and fast-moving domain. What may be up-to-date today could have disappeared from the virtual landscape tomorrow. It is therefore crucial for firms to have a set of guidelines that can be applied to any form of Social Media, whether they are part of the aforementioned list or not. Next, we provide such a set of recommendations. Given that Social Media have both a social- and a media-component, we split our advice into two sections: five points about using media and five points about being social.

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