VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI SCHOOL OF BUSINESS TRAN THI THU TRANG SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IN VIETNAM A STUDY OF CONSUMER PROFILES Major: Business Administration Code: 60 34 05 MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION THESIS Supervisor: Dr. Tran Doan Kim Hanoi – Oct 2011 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com TABLE OF CONTENT Introduction .1 Goals and Scope. Review of social media marketing. Concepts in social media marketing.
Word-of-mouth. User-generated content and Web 2. Social technographic ladders. User-centered marketing communication.
Social media types. Chatting software and microblogging. Social news, social bookmarking and content aggregators. Social network sites.
Media sharing and content communities. Integrated and mobile social media. More on social media marketing practices. Social media and social media marketing in Vietnam .16 vii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Social media landscape. Social media marketing. Methodology for consumer research for social media users in Vietnam 20 2. Review of existing research.
Thesis of (Ivanauskas, 2009) for the UK market. Thesis of (Khan, 2009) for markets of Italia, Spain, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. Data collection process. Consumer analysis and recommended entry strategy for marketing management into social media.
The consumer profile of web 2.0 citizen in Vietnam. User patterns in interaction with company. The profile of Vietnam social media users – an overview. The profile of Vietnam social media users – a deeper look.
The influence of social media on Vietnamese consumers in marketing communication. Recommended strategy for marketing management into social media .58 Conclusion and Future Work .63 viii LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF FIGURES Figure 3.1: Gender distribution of respondents.2: Distribution of age groups .3: Income distribution amount respondents.4: Average rank of social media services in terms of popularity (the higher rank – the more popular - means the smaller numerical value).5: Distribution of places and locations.6: Distribution in usage time per week.7: Usage time among young people per week.8: Preference of content types.9: Reasons for users to start a conversation with company.10: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company.11: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company, among the age groups.12: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company, among the genders.13: the personal reason to participate in conversation or interact with the company through social media applications .14: The main obstacles to interact with the company through Social Media Sites .15: Roles playing among respondents (a person may play multiple roles).38 ix LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.16: Roles playing by US users (Source: Forrester Research).17: Role distribution of the two age groups 15-24 and 25-34.18: Online behavior with respect to genders.19: Preferences of content when Creators interact with the company.20: What Creators will do after interacting with the company.21: Social media that belong to the top two choices among Creators.22: Time spent on social media sites by Creators and Critics.23: Personal gains for using social media among Critics and Collectors.24: Preferences of content in interaction with the company by Joiners.25: Main obstacles that stop Joiners from joining social media sites.26: Reasons for interacting with the company by Joiners and Spectators.27: Preferences of content when Spectators interact with the company.28: What users may do after interacting with the company through social media services.29: User responses to the question whether the company should contact them for marketing purposes.30: Media and their powers of influencing customer‟s mind.53 x LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com LIST OF TABLES Table 1.3: Online community needs.1: How social media tools will meet business goals, Henna (2009).2: Opportunities and challenges of social media, Henna (2009) .4: Why the Vietnamese go online? (Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook 2010, citing from Cimigo Netcitizens).1: Correlation between social media types used and expected outcomes after company-consume interaction (the numbers are the count of responses).2: Correlation between social media choice and responses to marketing purposes.3: Preferences of commercial messages with respect to media choices and origin of the messages.4: Technographics with respect to ads on different media.6: Summary of Vietnamese technographics.57 xi LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com Introduction Motivations With the advent of Internet in the last quarter of the 20th century and the public availability of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the digital landscape has completely changed. Access to a massive amount of information is just a click away. Communication is made easy – we can now send emails to colleagues, perform instant chats with friends, or even make long distant calls at the rate that was not previously possible.
In the last few years, the change has been more profound – users are no longer a passive consumer of existing Web content, they are actively creating new content and sharing it. The change has resulted in a fairly firm body of knowledge known as social media (sometimes, the citizen media). As the name suggested, this new media is characterized by the social dimensions – the many-to-many interactivity between users and the content being generated by the users rather than the traditional publishers. According to Zarrella (2010), there are more than 346 million people who read blogs and more than 184 million people are bloggers themselves.
The move catches the attention of the general public by the constant appearance of new buzzwords. For example, the word-of-the-year was “Blog” in 2004, “Podcast” in 2005, “Facebook” in 2007, and “Unfriend” in 2009 (New Oxford American Dictionary). This poses great challenges and opportunities for both businesses and academia to study this fast changing cultural and social phenomenon. It is important to understand the users of the new media.
One of the most profound changes in users is the shift from being the audience of the media to being the media themselves. Thus the access to users is made easier, but the users have so much power in generating the content, filtering out the messages, defining how the messages will be passed. Social interaction is redefined substantially since there 1 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com are virtually no constraints on geography, physical presense in any conversation, and on the number of audiences. The only limitations are perhaps the amount of information processed by a typical user for a period of time, the difficulty of cross-language communication, and the privacy concerns when going online.
The nature of new communication methods asks for a new look for the area of marketing. In particular, we need to characterize the users as well as the ways messages are generated, transmitted and received. For example, the nature of word-of-mouth communication gives rise to two broad categories of users: opinion leaders and opinion seekers (Gilly et al, 1980). A deeper look at the nature of online usage, five types of users can be recognized: those who create the content, those who make comment on content, those who simply join the social network, those who collect and share the content and those who simply consume content created by the others (Li & Bernoff, 2008).
Although social media in generally and social media marketing in particular are in the current research agenda of many institutions, the number of studies is still limited. The materials are in fact mostly made by marketing practitioners and consultants, and those people who have positioned themselves as social media experts (e. see Weinberg, 2009; Scott, 2010; Zarrella, D. These are more about proposing marketing strategies for companies rather than understanding the users, and there is little backup evidence on the proposed strategies.
Furthremore, very little research has been done for culture-specific social media marketing: most research is reported on the US or European markets, and very little is on other areas like Vietnamese users. Goals and Scope This thesis is aimed at deeper understanding of social media users in general, and in the Vietnam market in particular. Despite lagging behind those leading countries, Vietnam is catching up fast. The current Internet penetration rate is estimated to be 35%, which accounts for roughly 30 million users – and is ranked 2 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 7th worldwide (Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook, 2010).
Almost all young generation users will be expected to go online in the next few years. More specifically, we would like to answer three research questions. First, what are the characteristics of Vietnamese users in the comparison with those of users from other countries. Second, what are the impacts that the social media users have on company‟s marketing goals? And third, what can companies do to utilize the new media for their marketing/branding strategies? We therefore aim to achieve three related goals: Constructing a questionnaire that can help company to create social media consumer profiles in Vietnam, Determining whether social media can be considered as an effective marketing channel, from the user perspectives, and Deriving a list of recommendations for marketing management for entering social media.
Limitations In carrying out this study, we indentify that there are constraints that will limit our results: The time constraints for the Master thesis, as well as the resources allocated to obtain answers in questionnaires from both users and companies. The subject is new, and prior research materials are limited (although there are currently a dozen of books and many websites devoted to the subject – but these are generally non-research with little numerical evidences to back- up claims). 3 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Review of social media marketing In this chapter, we review the literature on social media marketing.
In particular, we will briefly describe social media concepts, their implications for marketing, and finally the current state of social media and social media marketing in Vietnam. Concepts in social media marketing Social media refers to those “relate to sharing of information, experiences and perspectives throughout community-oriented websites” (Weinberg, 2009, p. This community-based sharing idea is indeed an old concept, for example, it can date back to a conferencing system called WELL (Whole Earth eLectronic Linkm 1985), which allowed public conversations as well as private exchanges (Rheingold, 2000). One of the very first social networking websites was SixDegrees (1997) which let people create profiles and connect with friends.
However, it was not until the early 2000s, social media took off once it reached a critical mass of users. Social media is now accepted as a new media – competing well with traditional media (such as news papers, radio and TV) in number of users and attention. Examples of social media include blogs, forums, message boards, user-generated sites, multimedia sharing sites, social network sites, wikis and podcasts. The new media opens a new room for marketing practitioners – the set of practices known as social media marketing (SMM).
According to Garnyte and Perez (2009), SMM is “a process that empowers individuals to promote their websites, products or services through online channels and to communicate with and tap into a much larger community that may not have been available via traditional advertising channels”. Further, SMM is “about listening to the community and responding in kind”. 4 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com In this section, we review the key concepts that give rise to these practices, including: word-of-mouth, user-generated content and Web 2.0, user-centered communication. In the next section, each social medium is examined in greater details.
Word-of-mouth Word-of-mouth (WOM) is the process of exchanging message from person to person. The typical information exchanged includes brands, products, services and organizations (e. In social media, WOM is highly efficient because a message can be sent instantly and reaches a massive number of audiences at once. Another remarkable characteristic of WOM is the division into two sets of roles: opinion leaders and opinion seekers (Gilly et al, 1998; Chu, 2009, p.
Generally speaking, opinion leaders are those who provide and transmit information to their peers, and as a result, influence others‟ opinions.