Social Media and Networks: Impact of Marketing on the Products of Information Technology

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

RATIONALE AND LITERATURE REVIEW3

Rationale3

Literature review5

REFERENCES13

BIBLIOGRAPHY17

RATIONALE AND LITERATURE REVIEW

Rationale

With less and less people trusting and paying attention to traditional advertising, advertisers and marketers are turning to more innovative ways to reach their audiences, and viral marketing is one of them. IT industry is now realizing the benefits of viral marketing and is trying to integrate it into its tactics. There are issues that arise though for IT industry managers to be associated with a marketing technique. This research aims to discover how IT industry is overcoming those stereotypes and integrating this technique into their strategies. With ever changing technology, it is important to stay on top of the trends and continue to reach audiences in creative ways. The importance of this study lies in that statement.

Practitioners and academics must understand how viral marketing is being implemented and transformed to better fit the intentions of IT industry. Though the term has been around for several years, the marketing world's understanding of viral marketing is still in its infancy. Some, even those within the advertising industry, see viral as nothing more than a funny video, passed around by consumers online. One Advertising Age article claimed that putting forth a successful viral campaign is as simple as this; Create something fun that appeals to the YouTube set- something that doesn't scream Buy this product!. It is this tendency to see viral marketing in very narrow terms that has stunted its potential as a new way of approaching advertising. Viral marketing as we have known it needs to be reconsidered. Of course, the rise of viral marketing is directly linked to the pitfalls that traditional advertising has seen in recent years. No less than advertising legend Maurice Saatchi has declared “The Strange Death of Modern Advertising” in a 2006 speech, reprinted n the Financial Times of London. The first stage of the illness, they said, was sociology - the family no longer gathered to watch television. So they said:the 30-second commercial was finished. The next symptom was technology - because, they said, even if family members were all in the same house, they would not be watching the same screen. Laptops, mobile phones, iPods, games - all brought more media fragmentation, more channels more choice, more complications (Saatchi, 2006).

As the advertising world mourns death of the old model of "push" marketing (Grant, 2006) and looks for “life after the 30-second spot” (Jaffe, 2005), it is clear that a new marketing paradigm is needed. The old model of advertising in which the audience was a captive one, is gone. “Today, advertisers chase consumers with a certain air of desperation,” (Auletta, 2005, p. 38). With the rise of technology and its ability to bring individual consumers, together in new force, a viral approach to marketing seems less like an imperative than an option. Audiences are behaving as networks—networks primed for the introduction of new brand ideas that look less like ...