✅ Marketing Communication to and with Net Citizens: Targeting by Means of a Social Network Analysis Approach - Artikel

Empirical investigations of the time devoted to Internet interactions indicate that this time
surpasses the time spent passively watching TV. This provides marketers with new
communication opportunities: First, the WWW is becoming progressively more important in
the media world in relation to the phenomenal speed at which it is growing. Even more
important, and in contrast to TV-recipients, net citizens are not passive, but explore
information actively, choose by themselves the contents that are interesting and sift out less
relevant contents and communication partners. They are not restricted to just receiving
companies? marketing communication, but can interact with both vendors and other
customers in real time and leave their individual opinions, recommendations and reports on
experiences with products and services in newsgroups and blogs. These information and
communication fragments could remain for years in the virtual environment. Thus, for
marketers, it is one of the major issues to identify individuals who are willing to engage in a
positive communication process and potentially persuade other individuals to join this
communication and share their opinions.

In this study, we introduce an approach for marketing communication on MySpace online
communities. For targeting individuals, we consider the users? position in the information
space by means of social network analysis. We develop four different marketing options for
advertising on MySpace. As an illustration, we outline these marketing options using the
example of a fictive product launch campaign.

Autor

Prof. Dr. Ralf Wagner
Martin Klaus; Jörg Schwerdtfeger