Discuss about hte Case Study Of Microsoft Social Media Marketing.
Communication is the integral part of the business that determines the relationship with the stakeholders internally. Externally, communication is important to explain people about the products and services and how it may fit into their life. Social media is changing the nature of communication that takes place in business. The aim of the essay is to discuss the impact of social media on the contemporary business communication. There is a continuous evolution of the technological advances in the business communication. Social media tool has played a great role in the success of the business. The tool has changed the external and internal communication system of the business. Businesses today have become more open, democratic and participatory than before. Such changes have been previously unforseen in business sector (Wollschlaeger et al. 2017). For this purpose the essay uses the case study of Microsoft social media marketing as obtained from the www.forbes.com. According to the Forbes’s news in 2017 Microsoft has changed the science of sales. The news highlighted that the company is “using LinkedIn to take on salesforce.com” (Evans 2018). In regards to the case study the essay explains the way social media changes have impacted the operations of the modern business. Further the essay discusses the fundamental opportunities and challenges that social media creates for the modern businesses.
There were great challenges to business communication 20 years ago. For instance, difficulty communicating with people from different cultural backgrounds, problems with long emails and queues, poor availability for 24*7 calls. However, it is easy now to tweet 24*7 even out of office a concept absent 20 years ago. With online communication it is less a burden to travel places. Customers can now communicate from home rather than operating through desktops. There is more engagement with people than before with SQL integrations and Google+. In a minute there is bulk of data generated currently, than 20 years ago. The credit goes to social media (Baruah 2012).
Social media positively impacts the business communication with customers. According to Dong and Wu (2015) employees are believed to be the most credible source of information by 41% of the response in the 2013 survey. Employees can share the right message with the use of the online advocacy platform like Bambu. Microsoft corporation one of the world’s biggest technological companies has incorporated the social media tool in its daily business for improving communication with customers. Social media helps improve a business by enhancing the responsiveness of the stakeholders. It eases the way the customer can give and take feedbacks. Business can easily view complaints and deal with it rapidly (Jussila et al. 2014). According to Baruah, (2012) social media improves the communication and branding system. By engaging with the customers at deeper level through social profiles and websites and improves the branding efforts. It will allow the prospective customer to better identify the brand characteristics.
Microsoft has created the social media management software system that was the cause of the company’s advancement. Microsoft has adopted the social media system for employee involvement, product development, and customer engagement. Use of the social program called “Microsoft Teams” the whole company is well connected with the trams and it has facilitated a strong collaboration. It helped the company to take its productivity to new stage. The communication system has improved as this program allows the individual members of the specific team to access the “file share tab” (Fox, 2018). The company also developed the “Microsoft Social Command Center” that helps to direct the customers and manage them in right location. They can grab the social opportunities by over viewing all the social channels. It helped the company to engage with the customers in authentic ways and shifted through the social chatter. Thus, social media impact the business communication positively by creating a social environment between business and customers. By using Sprinklr like platform, a large team at Microsoft manages its each product by planning, listening, driving paid media and engaging across 150 channels (Sprinklr 2017). The social engagement are quickly monitored and navigated by the command centre team just by keyword searches. It is easy for the members to address queries through personal handles (Fox 2018).
Wang et al. (2012) argued that social media has changed the nature of marketing in the contemporary business. When compared to the blanket marketing approach the nature of the social networking platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook triggers greater response from the customers. It has improved the process of marketing the products and services without overwhelming the customers. It is way easier to spread the word about the business by strategically placing the advertisements. When compared to traditional marketing, social media has changed the way of finding the potential customers using the keywords and hashtags. This, social media is an efficient approach to track the competitors as this tool is very informative. It is easy to interpret the factors affecting the industry. Social media increases the online presence as internet has become the integral part of every person’s daily lives. It allows the customers to make purchasing decisions, which has great impact on the advertisement and marketing. However, it is affordable as there is no need of extensive budget even when competing with other popular brands.
Microsoft has integrated the social media into the public relation strategy. It allows the customers to think about the business positively. In case of Microsoft the use of LinkedIn and Facebook gave the customers the opportunity to engage with each other. It gave the business the opportunity to smartly mix and engage content. Social media allows the business to develop a friendly and responsive persona (Sebastiano 2015). It will help attract the customers, who can recommend the services and the products of the company to others and overall grow as the focused community. Microsoft curates contents for the brand ambassadors to share with their social network (Microsoft 2017). The company in this way is able to streamline the important messages that matters to the brand (Evans 2018). Microsoft has crafted an extraordinary level of success with the integration of LinkedIn in every fact of the Microsoft’s business such as productivity, data, enterprise apps, AI and more (Microsoft Business Team 2017). With the help of LinkedIn, Microsoft efficiently tracks, identifies and communicates with the clients and build relationships with the customers. The satisfaction rate of Microsoft’s customer was found to be 97% (Fox 2018).
There are various opportunities given by the social media. People can access web from anywhere computers, smartphones, laptops, tablets, and even internet based televisions. It is easier for the business to directly target the customers through social media marketing campaigns, launch and promote new products, and create brand awareness. It is easier for the business to personally interact with both potential and existing customers (Cardon and Marshall 2015). The same is evident from the Microsoft’s 530-million-plus members in LinkedIn (Evans 2018). The business can even use the social media activity to measure the referrals to sales. Mobile devices are used for carrying out significant amount of social media activities. Microsoft uses a social media strategy for advertisement and marketing that is compatible with the mobile devices. It allows its customers to talk about the pertinent issues. The company now deals with its customer at personal level and enhance the brand image. The customers of the Microsoft are more receptive to information shared by the company as the brand is involving with its clients more than before. That is helping them view the company has approachable and accessible (Sebastiano 2015).
According to Jussila et al. (2014) social media is cheap and effective in interaction with target market. With minimum investment one can have big impact possible in case of marketing campaign. Microsoft too had grabbed the new opportunities given by integrating LinkedIn. One of the benefits to the Microsoft is the “Microsoft Relationship Sales”. It helps to pair up the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool with the Microsoft’s SaaS apps–Dynamics 365 for Sales. It is the big customer win for the company as it reaches its delighted customer in just a minute. It has the opportunity to use the fusion products at Park Place Technologies to integrate the information to single platform to allow saving time and improved productivity of Park Place’s sales team. As the whole company will collaborate in real time, there will be a high growth trajectory. Simultaneously it will also allow delivering the outstanding service to its data centre customers. Consequently, there is a cloud war between Microsoft and Salesforce (Evans 2018). By adapting to social networking sites, Microsoft has transformed the process of selling the products and services. The 530 plus members in LinkedIn has the potential to interlace with Microsoft Dynamics Sales. It is estimated that the customer relationship management applications may have price tag of $26.2-billion look like a bargain. There is a vast revenue opportunity in the first level for the applications to support, automate service, partner relationships, and more (Archambault and Grudin 2012).
It can be interpreted from the above discussion that Microsoft has turned highly innovative. Use of social media has change the company from old fashioned one into the heap and leading edge. It was not very innovative earlier when compare to the Google, Amazon, and Apple. The product development and design has improved by staying ahead of technology. In all the sectors the company it was able to foster high level of collaboration which has improved its overall employee management. It is creating new products and design by increasing data collection from the social media channels. This process was quick unlike the traditional modes of meetings and surveys. In old business model without social media it was a long process to spark creativity. Creation of new products and design was a very hectic without social media. This led to rapid business growth as Microsoft advertised and marketed only what it could offer. It has been devising new marketing strategies based on feedback from Facebook users that are tailored to their needs. The company is ahead of competition by boosting online traffic to its site. These medium helps it to provide best products and services (Sebastiano 2015, Microsoft Business Team 2017, Evans 2018).
In addition to opportunities, social media also comes with various challenges. It is difficult to determine the best platform of social media; the time needs to be devoted, and ways to improve the organic reach. People are inundated with the social media content, as per day there are around 500 million tweets, with more than 350 million photos uploaded on Facebook pages such as Bing, Xbox, offie, as well windows phone. Microsoft also has Pinterest accounts that attracts 869 followers. Without appropriate media management tool it is arduous to track the performance and make adjustments. Thus, there is constant demand of devising strategies to push content to the next level and yet have humanistic relationship with the customers (Ashley and Tuten 2015).
Ashley and Tuten (2015) argued that customers have heightened expectations about the business. It is difficult to manage the customer expectations. Ethical issues are the major limitations of the social media that may end up having legal implications. There is a need to come up with best practices to avoid ethical issues. It is because the social media will enhance the customer loyalty and quickly helps build brand awareness. This process of public forum conversation comes with dangers such as handling the negative feedback. In response to this Scott (2015) argue that developing the social media strategy is the biggest challenge. Lack of defined objectives and goals will drain huge amount of time. Another tricky challenge is to measure the social media ROI. It is difficult to see the value of tweet when compare to number of clicks on an ad. It may be difficult to achieve without quantifiable goals. Further, without a proper employee advocacy program it is difficult to turn employees into brand advocates. In case of Microsoft, the privacy issue was prominent when it detected a woman at risk of postpartum depression through online communication. There is a huge breach to privacy with social media that has potential for legal implications.
The essay had discussed the impact of the social media on business communication. It can be concluded that this tool improves the business communication for smooth operations at daily level, which was completely absent 20 years ago. Through social media marketing it is easy to know the customer’s needs and improve responsiveness. It is easy to stay ahead of competition by adopting the digital marketing strategies like Microsoft, which is both B2B and B2C company. The company has boosted its online sales using social media. The social media has helped in effective marketing, identifying potential customers in less time, increased affordability, and database management from remote locations and build strong social environment. Social media gives various opportunities and the main one is information access about the customers. Such online presence greatly impacts the purchase decision. This has greatly changed the advertising in general. In addition to various opportunities there are many challenges associated with the use of social media.
References
Archambault, A. and Grudin, J., 2012, May. A longitudinal study of facebook, linkedin, & twitter use. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2741-2750). ACM.
Ashley, C. and Tuten, T., 2015. Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1), pp.15-27.
Baruah, T.D., 2012. Effectiveness of Social Media as a tool of communication and its potential for technology enabled connections: A micro-level study. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 2(5), pp.1-10.
Cardon, P.W. and Marshall, B., 2015. The hype and reality of social media use for work collaboration and team communication. International Journal of Business Communication, 52(3), pp.273-293.
Dong, J.Q. and Wu, W., 2015. Business value of social media technologies: Evidence from online user innovation communities. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 24(2), pp.113-127.
Evans, B. 2018. How Microsoft Is Using LinkedIn To Take On Salesforce.com And Transform The Science Of Sales. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2017/12/11/how-microsoft-is-using-linkedin-to-take-on-salesforce-com-and-transform-the-science-of-sales/#5984f96f2998 [Accessed 24 Apr. 2018].
Fox, M. 2018. The Future is Here – How Microsoft Integrated Social Media Company Wide – Social Media for Business Performance. [online] Smbp.uwaterloo.ca. Available at: https://smbp.uwaterloo.ca/2017/11/the-future-is-here-how-microsoft-integrated-social-media-company-wide/ [Accessed 24 Apr. 2018].
Jussila, J.J., Kärkkäinen, H. and Aramo-Immonen, H., 2014. Social media utilization in business-to-business relationships of technology industry firms. Computers in Human Behavior, 30, pp.606-613.
Microsoft 2017. 25 innovations by Microsoft you might not have known. Retrieved November 27, 2017, Retrieved from https://news.microsoft.com/apac/2016/11/25/25-innovations-by-microsoft-you-might-not-have-known/
Microsoft Business Team 2017. How Microsoft uses social media to create the customer experience. Retrieved November 27, 2017, from https://enterprise.microsoft.com/en-us/articles/blog/microsoft-in-business/microsoft-uses-social-media-create-customer-experience/
Scott, D.M., 2015. The new rules of marketing and PR: How to use social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. John Wiley & Sons.
Sebastiano, 2015. How Microsoft uses social media to improve employee collaboration. Retrieved November 27, 2017, from https://www.benefitscanada.com/news/how-microsoft-uses-social-media-to-improve-employee-collaboration-71147
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