The social revolution and its marketing opportunities

The title gives the reader a hint about marketing in social media, but in reality social media is a lot more than a tool of marketing and on the other hand marketing can be done in infinite ways in social media.

Here we try our best to present some ideas.


Social media is all about peer-to-peer communication. It has been a growing trend to listen more what other consumers think of products, rather than investigating the companys own releases. This is utilized in hospitality industry in websites such as tripadvisor, hotels.com, eat.fi etc. where the customers can share their opinions about the companys services and potential customers can evaluate their choices beforehand.

Other peer-to-peer applications which can be used in marketing as well are for example different group deals (groupon, offerium... etc. where the offer is actualized when sertain amount of people engage in purchasing the product), web stores which show most popular products their customers have bought, or FourSquare, a mobile application that can be used to log in to for example a bar the customer has stepped in, and the bar can revert to this log-in by sending an offer to the customer. One of the latest applications is emotionr.com, where the user can share his or her feelings in a certain place.


The Web 2.0 is full of different social media and ways of informing. We embrace peer-to-peer communication and stress the fact that the companies nowadays should think of the social media as a tool to be utilized. There are many great analysis tools, such as Google Alerts and SocialMention.com, which can be utilized in monitoring what is going on in the internet, companywise, so there is no excuse in ignoring what people share about the company. Because of the fact that anyone can write what they want, it is also good that the company is involved in the conversation correcting the "false" information and showing themselves in a positive light.
Haikko Manor has its own facebook account, it can be found with google maps and in wikipedia, but cannot be found on twitter. There are also ratings about Haikko Manor in tripadvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com/Hotel_Review-g315777-d324908-Reviews-Hotel_Haikko_Manor-Porvoo_Southern_Finland.html)

By the way, we cheked out what Socialmention.com had to say about Haikko Manor, and found out that the average mention time frame for Haikko is 3 days and the strenght, in other words the likelyhood that the brand is discussed in social media, 0 %!
Another interesting application is howsociable.com, where people can measure how much conversation about the company has in social media. It is measured in tweets, status updates, youtube videos and so on. We found out Haikko Manors "magnitude": 1.1. In a scale of 1 to 10, this result is quite poor and the target of our investigation would most certainly benefit from utilizing more social medias.


Back in the days the information from companies to customers was somewhat like this: "We have released a new product". Now we see more and more dialogues between the two, like saying "We have released a new product, what do you think about it?". We as students know that a monologue, such as the first presented, as a learning method is the most boring one. A lecturer who is somehow involving students in his or her teaching is more interesting, educating and fun. This is what companies should as well accept: crowd-sourcing and collaboration with customers and potential customers will lead in better customer satisfaction and more money to the company. The new way of communication could be "We could offer a new product, do you have any ideas?"    

There has been a lot of negative conversation about staff hanging on facebook while working, and people have lost their jobs due to posting a negative comment about their employer on Twitter or Facebook. (check this out for more information http://mashable.com/2011/06/16/weinergate-social-media-job-loss/) Some statistics also show that 54 % of all U.S. companies are bloking social networking sites from their employees.
We claim for improvements both in companies mental state as well as the employees.
Instead of creating a block for social media, well preventing the staff from using their expencive working hours at facebook, and even slag the employee beacuse of a rough day, the management should encourage the employees to connect in social media as positive reprecentatives of the company, upselling their company while facebooking, eg. "Had a busy day at work, check out the great new offer we have!", and listening to the potential customers. Even facebook can be so much more than status updates like "going to bed now", "having a coffee"... allthough unfortunately they who should see the potential in social media don't see it like that.


This kind of social awareness, business intelligence or social media intelligence is a mental state that helps to understand the ever changing  business environment. In the current economical situation these tools are great, inexpencive ways to detect where the market is going, it could benefit one company ower another. Could Haikko Manor stand up for this?

http://en.rian.ru/infographics/20110228/162792394.html