Abstract
Driven by an evolving wave of information technology revolution, the pace of digital media integration into business marketing is constantly accelerating (Wu & Sun, 2023). Social media marketing thus has become an increasingly heated topic among business communication academics, considering its active participation, interactive speed, convenience, affordance, and other prominent advantages (Ananda et al., 2016). This book under review builds on the author Jenkin’s firsthand experiences of running or working in business organizations, highlighting “where and how companies can establish a social media presence, grow it and engage their community over time” (p. 5). Despite its thought-provoking practical implications for entrepreneurs and communication professionals, any researcher in related fields can also gain some valuable insights concerning social media strategies in reputation/impression management, public relations, and community/brand engagement. In other words, for scholarly readers of International Journal of Business Communication, the significant value may lie more in its theoretical guidance of inspiring them on what is worthy of being studied in the early stage and what possible explanations of their results can be made to better interpret their findings at the end of the research process.
This volume contains a brief introduction about its background, motivation, and focus of writing, as well as 14 subsequent chapters that deconstruct the key theme-based considerations in social media marketing from different perspectives, such as social media governance and policy development (Chapter 3), employee advocacy and personal branding (Chapter 7), and in-house or outsource (Chapter 8). Chapter 15 brings all the findings together and provides several reference opinions on the development of future social media marketing in business settings.
Chapter 1 starts the discussion by instructing us how to find the oriented and progressing ways to achieve the marketing objectives through social media operation, like what has been mainly explored in Vernuccio’s (2014) study about the basics of communicating corporate brands through social media. The role and its responsibilities sufficiently defined, the right resources, people, tools and other forms of supports, the ever-changing innateness of social media, the unspoken politics, the starting-point and expected outcome, and the monitoring of process all contribute to the final circulation of business marketing content on social media.
In Chapters 2 and 3, the author concentrates on the broad factors of managing social media marketing. Specifically, Chapter 2 introduces the social media audit and highlights a critically essential subset of it—content auditing. On the one hand, part of the audit examines the existing environment of practice, such as targeted channels, established fans and followers, and the current toolkit. A SWOT analysis might be extremely helpful in this step. On the other hand, as for content audit, the author argues the taste and preferences of audiences should direct the format and content of message. In this sense, making corresponding adjustments instantly over time is the key to success. Sometimes, the third-party content can also be utilized to generate a significant cross-promoting effect of social presence. In Chapter 3, the author switches the attention to the social media governance and policy development. To begin with, “organizations need to be clear about their philosophy regarding the social media policy and do everything possible to ensure that it is properly communicated across the enterprise” (p. 37). For example, their policies should be positioned properly as the draconian-cum-specificity-oriented or empowering-cum-openness-oriented. Moreover, employees are also expected to be informed clearly about what they should do and shouldn’t do on social media operations, allowing for the privacy, copyright, administrative hierarchy, and crisis management issues of disclosure, so as to enhance their perception about the degree of organizational transparency and quality relationship outcomes with the organization (Men et al., 2023). At last, the author once again emphasizes the importance of updates about the governance framework and protocols.
After that, the author starts to scale down the discussion into more micro and in-house-specific elements within organizations. Chapter 4 features a “content-wins-everything” logic and moves into mapping an organization-tailored strategy into “a content calendar that takes some of the guesswork out while leaving some slack in the system to respond to media events and other content priorities as they arise” (p. 51). The author also points out several applicable methods of executing the designed content strategy and measuring its success. No one is born with the skill to understand social media marketing so Chapter 5 highlights the critical role of training and provides some referenceable insights to learn from, including the spectrum of knowledge, forms of assessment, curriculum design, help-seeking from an outside party, and sustainability of the training program. Chapter 6 further explains that the data-rich nature of social media also places demanding requirements for practitioners regarding social media analytics and measuring the return on investment (ROI). Indeed, employees can also promote their company on private social media to fulfill the business marketing functions. In Chapter 7, the author exemplifies the effectiveness of employee advocacy and personal branding with many real cases in digital world. There is often a dilemma concerning “whether to build social media capabilities in-house or outsource support to an external vendor” (p. 110). Chapter 8 digs deep into the pros and cons of each in detail.
The remaining half of the book investigates social media marketing philosophies from a more external perspective. Chapter 9, labeled as “beware bright shiny syndrome,” concerns the emerging social media platforms, such as Bebo, Orkut, Google Wave, Vine, Path, Google+, Ning, and Myspace, and discuss how to decide whether to invest time and energy in them or not from the side of cost-performance. In Chapter 10, the author highlights the importance of brand consistency and coordination in different social media accounts and content. Chapter 11 differentiates the concepts of brand monitoring and social listening and argues that Twitter still dominates the uncontrolled digital media ecosystem, which organizations should pay special attention to. Besides Twitter alike, as the agreed-upon common place of business communication competitions among worldwide organizations, some other paid social media platforms can also be employed to target more persona-based audiences, as explained in Chapter 12. In addition, Chapter 13 probes into the strategic use of hashtags in denoting trending topics and perpetuating memes to win digital engagement on social media. In Chapter 14, the author explores “how brands showing humanity offline can spill onto social media” to prove that “the more brands show their humanity by delighting their customers the stronger the affinity those customers will have for them” (p. 14).
Some minor limitations can also be seen. First, the absence or inadequacy of relevant topics or perspectives, such as social media adoption in a business-to-business context (Anders et al., 2020), potential cross-industrial variance (Veldeman et al., 2017), and internal team communication practices (Anders, 2016), may disappoint some critical readers. Moreover, the second half of this volume (Chapters 9–14) is somewhat over-technical and might therefore be only suitable for communication practitioners. In spite of the critiques mentioned above, this book is still a noteworthy publication in the field of business communication via social media since its highly accessible language and professional content can greatly enhance our understanding of the production and interpretation of social memes as a vital and vibrant form of business marketing.