Based on the previous discussion about and comparison of the two concepts of exclusivity paradigm and the open source character of social media, the maintenance of exclusivity while opening their communication to millions of users emerged as main challenge for luxury marketers. As mentioned before, luxury marketers have pursued a very exclusive communication strategy targeting their consumers directly. By using social media this exclusive communication and targeting is watered down. This development is one of the most significant paradigm shifts within their history (Costa and Handley, 2011). Now every user can communicate on the brand publically.
Read moreHow Brands Should Deal with a Social Media Crisis. United Airlines case
With the huge rise of Social Media over the last decade, a new era has begun in the web environment. The presence of social media such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc have utterly changed the online scene for brand managers and marketers (Fournier & Avery, 2011). Billions of people were now connected and were able to express their thoughts, write articles, share images and videos.
Social media brought the world closer by providing a platform where everyone and from everywhere could join. Just to take a picture and understand the massive size of social media; Facebook statistics in 2014, showed that their monthly active users are 1.39 billion people, while Youtube users account for more than 1 billion as well (Facebook, 2015; Youtube, 2015).
Read moreThe Power of Personal Branding in Social Media Part 2
To illustrate the opportunities social media present to individuals I would like to look at some examples where everyday people have been able to create strong personal brands and become new type of celebrities- celebrities of social media. Lets first look at second biggest social media platform YouTube, it has more than a billion users, every minute more than 300 hours of videos are uploaded on the site and everyday people watch billions of videos (youtube, n.d.).
Read morePower of Personal Branding in Social Media Part 1
Internet emergence of Web 2.0 has tremendously empowered individuals by providing the tools for successful personal branding. The advantage of Web 2.0 is that no longer the knowledge of complex coding language is necessary, this provided anyone with the opportunity can generate their own content online, upload their pictures or videos and directly share it in virtual world. (Labrecque, Markos and Milne, 2011). The information that people generate online leaves a digital footprint that indirectly results in personal branding. (Lampel and Bhalla 2007; Madden et al. 2007 cited in Labrecque, Markos and Milne, 2011). As such, social media has become an essential tool through which people express and present themselves and learn about others (Vazire, Gosling 2004 cited in Labrecque, Markos and Milne, 2011).
Read moreThe Rise of Social Media - A Double Sided Coin for Marketers
The development of Web. 2.0 technologies and rise of social media have taken most of us by surprise, marketers included, with the unexpected power shift and empowerment of consumers. The rise of social media and resulting power shift has turned the world upside down for marketers, requiring immediate adjustment to their mindsets, alteration of their strategies, and rethinking of their business approach to marketing.With the new interconnected era comes a new set of opportunities and challenges for marketers, which are to be examined shortly along with the areas in which marketers have experienced empowerment or disempowerment.
Read morePower is shifting through social media, consumers are taking the driver’s seat
Power is shifting through social media, consumers are taking the driver’s seat, brands may find them self´s demoted to passengers. Social media has altered the power balance between consumers and brands. Consumers are no longer passive bystanders, they have the power to create content and affect brands in a way that before social media was if not impossible, at least extremely challenging. However now consumers has a myriad of social media tool at their disposal, through which they can enforce power over brands and affect them in numerous ways. In other words social media is shifting the power, from brans to consumers. Thus the aim of this paper aims to investigate how consumers enforce their power is enforced on social media.
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