Social Media
Essays

The disruptive nature of social networks and their effects on marketing are revolutionizing every aspect customer relationships, including the re-ordering of marketing sales and services strategies. In aggregate social networks are bringing an entirely new level of insight and intelligence into how permission marketing, information acquisition and e-commerce strategies can be accomplished. The highest-performing marketing and sales organizations have successfully integrated the intelligence and insight gained from social networks via analytics and customer listening systems to better tailor selling, product and services strategies (Bampo, Ewing, Mather, Stewart, Wallace, 2008). Social networks have emerged as one of the most important and powerful platforms for aligning permission marketing to customer interest, segment and needs than any other development of the last decade. The insights gained from social networks in these areas are also completely revamping e-commerce strategies with much higher levels of personalization and more adept and agile multichannel marketing and selling strategies as well. The intent of this analysis is to analyze and evaluate how social networks are completely re-ordering the nature of customer relationships. The nascent yet very rapid growth of Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM), which is the combining of social networking-based prospect and customer information with the more structured and mature traditional CRM platforms is serving as the basis for many company's strategies in permission marketing, information acquisition and e-commerce strategies (Cooke, Buckley, 2008). The mercurial nature of social networks however has made it difficult for companies to gain greater insights into their customer bases. The reliance on advanced analytics in SCRM and CRM systems has made the task of completing permission marketing achievable. Social networking has however changed the entire dynamic of relationships with prospects, customers and the general public, infusing a much greater level of transparency and authenticity into the process. Ironically the majority of marketers aren't using social networks to listen and respond to customers, creating more effective relationships in the process. Instead the majority of marketers are relying on social networks and their many channels they represent to communicate un-directionally, going so far as to spam prospects and customers alike. What's needed for marketers to drive greater value from social networks is the ability to listen, create trust and sustain strong communication with prospects, customers and stakeholders throughout their spheres of influence. Marketers from both Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies have the potential to completely revolutionize their marketing, selling, service and long-term profitability by concentrating on these fundamentals (Doyle, 2007). The best practices of creating a very open, transparent and responsive level of communication throughout social media channels and across social networks permeate the companies getting the best results from these strategies. Consequently, their efforts at permission marketing, customer information acquisition and broader e-commerce strategies are significantly more successful (Harris, Rae, 2009). Companies excelling in this dimension of unifying social networks, permission marketing and customer information acquisition then driving effective e-commerce strategies include Amazon.com, Dell, Southwest Airlines and others who all have integrated social networks into their broader CRM platforms and strategies. Each of these companies have entire staffs dedicated to supporting their social CRM efforts and strategies, while also integrating unique customer data, managing ongoing marketing campaigns and responding to customer service requests that are initiated over social media channels. The net effect of this approach has been to galvanize the effectiveness of these social media channels for these companies (Jones, 2002). The best practices shown by Amazon.com, Dell, Southwest Airlines and others in this area of social networking is also showing that social networks can become a main part of any global, multichannel management selling and service strategy.

In this paper, we explore the concept of PESTEL analysis by means of illustration. We perform an elaborate PESTEL analysis of McDonald's, the world's fast food giant. This is then followed by a recommendation on what actions McDonald's can do in order to take care of the issues that have been exposed via the PESTLE analysis.

Literature Review / Theoretical Framework: The article in the journal Marketing Intelligence & Planning points to how marketing research is becoming more pivotal to companies due to increased global competition…

Given the exponential increase in data being generated across enterprise, social networking and legacy IT systems, the need for ensuring a consistent set of frameworks and objectives are used to bring relevance to this data is critical. The tendency of "boil the ocean" of data through Big Data initiatives including Hadoop, an open source analytics platform, have recently emerged as one viable alternative (McKendrick, 2012). Yet too often being able to take in literally terabytes of data and analyze it is of limited use without a consistent, strategic framework to make use of it (Rogers, 2011). Too many IT organizations are falling victim to speeding up mediocre reporting and analysis processes without first thinking about how to bring greater value into their strategic initiatives with the data (Daly, 2011). The answer to this dilemma isn't found in more technology; it's found in creating a more effective strategic framework to bring meaning into the data (Kalpic, Bernus, 2006).

¶ … social networking has in the last couple of years stirred a lot of debate among politician and scholars alike. The level of risks and benefits associated with social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and…

"At Linden Lab, creativity and innovation drive our business…we work hard and have plenty of fun along the way… we know it's our job to make dreams come true for our customers. It's all just part of our culture, the…

Effects on the Brand, Customers and Broader Business Environment

Social media can be referred to as any type of Internet-based media that is created through social interaction with which people basically produce rather than consume its content. In today's workplace, the most common…

The role of management consulting firms continues to go through a transformation as clients to these firms face an entirely new series of challenges and complexities in keeping their businesses viable.

The history of brand has quickly evolved from a relatively simple approach taken by companies to differentiate their products and services by name or graphical representation alone to highly targeted, effective, emotive approaches to communicating value. Brands have evolved from fairly generic approaches to communicating the functional value of a product or service to evoking emotions customers attain when using them. An example of this is the progression of Proctor & Gamble (P&G) to communicate the utilitarian values of soap in the previous centuries of their branding to the psychographic benefits to parents of providing clean clothes for their children. P&G continues to excel on this progression from the utilitarian or functional value their products deliver to the psychographic and emotive nature of them. Today the branding and positioning from P&G and other consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers concentrate on the contributory value of their products to the roles of consumers using them. In other words, using P&G soap and cleansers are marketed to imply a mother is more capable and caring for their family by using these products. The progression of the Coca-Cola brand is also a case in point. This company is masterful at the evolution of brands, progressing across over 150 nations with their branding strategies, creating a highly positive, energy-charge persona of their customer. All of these factors are orchestrated to create a highly effective strategy of reinforcing the core messaging and differentiated value of Coca-Cola.