By Kimberly Eugene, 7/29/2022
Social media equips marketers with new tools for encouraging dialogue with their consumers, however, one of the primary responsibilities for marketers is to LISTEN and understand the culture of their audience.
Listening allows marketers to observe communication, feedback and insight about the customer experience from social media conversations (Solis & Breakenridge, 2009). Rather than it coming from marketers, brand awareness comes from the social networks (Edelman, 2010). Therefore, social media strategies must focus on customer service and brand experience, not just raising awareness about products.
“Listening allows marketers to observe communication, feedback and insight about the customer experience from social media conversations.” (Solis & Breakenridge, 2009)
The Benefits of Word-of-Mouth via Social Media
Once customers make an informed decision about a product, and have a positive experience with said product, they then tend to spread positive word-of-mouth about the brand. Most marketers are also tuned into these conversations, however, listening should extend further than the spectrum of dialogue. Marketers must also become aware of key information regarding their target markets, like local laws and customs that affect their consumers.
For example, the country of Brazil has banned outdoor advertising. Research shows that this has led to a surge of online marketing amongst Brazilians. In fact, four-fifths of Brazilians who use social media use social networking sites to research products (Holmes, 2013).
Launched in 2004, Orkut — a social networking site owned and operated by Google and named after its creator, Orkut Büyükkökten, a Google employee (Geromel, 2011) — assessed this information regarding Brazilian advertising and capitalized on it. The original purpose of Orkut was for users to find communities through keyword search, including titles, description, and browsing through other users' memberships (Spertus et al., 2005), however, most Orkut users were interested in finding their classmates and friends, and did so by joining online schools, workplaces and residential street groups (Kugel, 2006).
In 2012, Orkut reached its peak popularity with 30 million users (Feigenbaum, 2014) and remained a market leader for 7 years. It was particularly popular among technology workers and students (Recuero, 2011). It allowed such users to connect with both people they knew in addition to people they admired, and the platform used its invite-only membership list to increase the feeling of exclusivity and prestige as a member of its community. Being a member of Orkut meant that one was well-connected in the technology world.
“Four months after its debut, Orkut had over 50,000 established communities. Within one year, this number rose to 1,500,000 communities.” (Spertus et al., 2005)
The eventual decline of Orkut occurred as a result of the site increasingly not meeting the needs of the culture and audiences, and so they lost their consumers and were eventually replaced by other culturally-similar social media platforms. Brazilians are usually more responsive to brand strategies that include online video, something that was a struggle for Orkut. The eventual decline came down to issues with website functionality, including blockages, limiting the number of friends, and difficulties in loading and sharing photos (Translate Media, 2015).
A bitter end for the site, however, many of today’s social networking sites have taken notes from the successes of Orkut’s community-building strategies and applications of social media technologies.
Kimberly Eugene - Content Marketing Specialist
Owner of PRTYNVRNDS LLC
Futuristic | Strategic | Developer | Positivity | Relator
prtynvrnds.business.blog
References:
Edelman, D.C. (2010) Branding in the digital age. Harvard Business Review, 88(12), 62–69.
Feigenbaum, G. (2014) Brazil to Google: please don't close our beloved Orkut. Available at http://www.vocativ.com/tech/internet/brazil-google-please-dont-close-beloved-orkut/ (accessed June 8, 2016).
Geromel, R. (2011) Facebook surpasses Orkut, owned by Google in numbers of users in Brazil. Available at http://www.forbes.com/sites/ricardogeromel/2011/09/14/facebook-surpasses-orkut-owned-by-google-in-numbers-of-users-in-brazil/#5ebe70dc4d5c (accessed June 8, 2016).
Holmes, R. (2013) The future of social media? Forget about the U.S., look to Brazil. Available at http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2013/09/12/the-future-of-social-media-forget-about-the-u-s-look-to-brazil/#532f4c36271c (accessed June 8, 2016).
Kugel, S. (2006) A web site born in U.S. finds fans in Brazil. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/10/technology/10orkut.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed June 8, 2016).
Recuero, R. (2011) Understanding the rise of social networking in Brazil. Available at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/raquel-recuero/understanding-rise-social-networking-brazil (accessed June 8, 2016).
Solis, B. & Breakenridge, D.K. (2009) Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR. Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press.
Spertus, E., Sahami, M. & Büyükkökten, O. (2005) Evaluating similarity measures: a large-scale study in the Orkut social network. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining, pp. 678–684. New York: ACM Press.
Translate Media (2015) Brazil social media. Available at http://www.translatemedia.com/us/translation-service/social-media/brazil-social-media/ (accessed June 8, 2016).