Faculty of Commerce & Economics Department of Business Administration & Marketing

Palestinian Businesses Utilization

Social Media Marketing

of

Prepared by: Ayman Qarout Supervised by: Mrs. Rania Jaber

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2010

Table of Contents
Chapter One Proposal . 4 Chapter Two Literature Review ..7 Internet Marketing 7 Social Media ..8 Social Media Characteristics 9 Social Media Channels 12 Social Media & Consumers .14 Social Media Marketing . 14 Social Media Marketing Tactics & Practices ..16 Conclusion . .18 Chapter Three Methodology .. .19 Chapter Four Findings . 22 Chapter Five Conclusion . 39 Recommendations ..40 3

References .41 Appendences 44

Chapter One

THE PROPOSAL

Introduction
Its not a new thing that businesses are tailoring their products and services to meet customer needs, and marketers are concentrating their efforts to better serve customer wants; they use public relations, news releases and other forms to speak with customers because they know that product-centric strategy is just not working anymore. Not long time ago, the start of the internet offered marketers new tools to deliver their messages, but all with the same concept, one-way communication flowing from business to customers. Now, the boom of Web 2.0 technologies and the introduction of social networks, blogs, podcasting and wikis had driven marketers to think of new creative ways to use such technologies for better communicating with customers and transform the equation from one-way to two-ways communications by better engaging customers, encourage sharing and participation. Savvy organizations are already exploring new grounds and embracing the new approaches, while most old-minded organizations are scared of the new experience.

Need of the Study

This study will research Palestinian organizations perception toward social media tools, and review the social media tactics used by companies from different industries and see whether these tactics are effective or not compared to the new media aspects.

Definitions and Major Terms Used

Social Media: content created by everyday people using highly accessible and scalable technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, microblogs, bookmarks, social networks, communities, wikis and vlogs. (Singh, 2009) 6

Problem Statement
This study will investigate the extent to which local organizations use social media as marketing tool, identifying tactics they use, comparing them to tactics applied by global organizations, and recommending actions to better utilize on this type of media.

Research Questions
How social media marketing is different from the traditional marketing? What is local organizations perception toward social media? What are the social media tools most used by local organizations? Which social media marketing tactics do local organizations use? Are they effective compared to global organizations uses? Do these tactics take advantage of the new media aspects?

Methodology
The research type is exploratory. The data will be collected from: Secondary sources: literature review of published books and articles. Primary sources: a structured questionnaire will be constructed and filled by selected companies. 7

Limitations
Because of time constrains, the sample selected will be small, and since the questionnaire will be administered by local companies, some resistance to meet the researcher and answer the questions is expected.

Chapter Two

LITERATURE REVIEW

The marketing play had never been the same; the game is always changing and adjusting to both social and technological trends. Marketing model had changed from the old not-effective productcentric approach to the better customer-centric where customers needs and wants are the major drives for any business and marketing effort. (Stefanou et al, 2003) Now, with the introduction of new technologies, and the second revolution of the internet, customers need to socialize and interact have grown even more, changing the relationship between the customer and the seller and putting more power in the hand of customer; because of this companies now are seeking to join the conversation with customers. (Meadows-Klue, 2007)

Internet Marketing
It is been since the Internet was first introduced that marketers were looking for ways to use it for commercial purposes and to help the businesses, some failed to use it, while others used it successfully. (Boone et al, 2007) Ngai (2000) defined Internet marketing as the process of building and maintaining customer relationships through online activities to facilitate the exchange of ideas, products, and services that satisfy the goals of both buyers and sellers (Ngai, 2000, P1) Many forms of Internet marketing surfaced; banner advertising, email advertising, pop-ups, paid and sponsored search engine advertisements; all these forms of advertising were the response for the large growth in Internet users and usage, and there is expectations that online marketing and advertising expenditures will grow larger than ever. (Boone et al, 2007) Marketing on the Internet had played a significant rule in the
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marketing strategy, and Internet became of the most important and effective marketing channels (Morgan, 1996) because the advantages it offered for both customers and marketers like rich marketing messages, one-to-one marketing, dynamic and real-time updates, rich customer data and segmented targeting of customers. (CPC Computer Consultants) The marketing strategy pyramid suggests the place of Internet marketing in the marketing strategy stages as follows:

(Constantinides et al, 2008, P13) As seen in the pyramid, to operate well in Internet marketing, one should have a good product/service base; and the top of the pyramid is the Web 2.0 Social Media marketing. (Constantinides et al, 2008)

Social Media
In start 2005, the second wave of internet technologies appeared that met very popular acceptance compared to the traditional internet start, because of the low cost of broadband connectivity and the (features these technologies offer to the user. (Constantinides, 2008
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What made social media even more accepted and embraced is what they offered of more user interaction, power and integration with (everyday lives. (Curtis, 2009 Many definitions for social media surfaced trying to show its social and :technological elements used; one successful definition is content created by everyday people using highly accessible and scalable technologies such as blogs, message boards, podcasts, microblogs, bookmarks, social networks, communities, wikis and (vlogs. (Singh, 2009, P10 :While Tamar Weinberg defined it as The sharing of information, experiences and perspectives throughout (community-oriented websites (Weinberg, 2009, P1 With such technologies, users enjoy writing about what they like, capturing and sharing videos, meeting new people and control what is delivered to them, it made the internet more social and gave the power to the user (Meadows-Klue, 2007); user-generated content is the keyword here because users are no longer consumers, they are the creators; Facebook, Twitter,YouTube, digg blogs and many other sites had given them the ability to be the publishers and generators. ((Agichtein, 2008 Users loved the power it gave them that some words related to using these technologies and specific sites include tagging, ranking, and tag cloud; blogging, friending, unfriending, wall, stream, tweeps and tweetups are now entered to English dictionaries, and are used in everydays life.

Social Media Characteristics

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Social media has many characteristics and features that make it different and somehow better than traditional media; researchers had used many terms to describe social media special characteristics: Participation and Sharing: Contents are no longer generated by traditional media suppliers (Burns & Bahnisch, 2009), its now user-generated; people create their own content and share it with others (Brussee & Hekman, 2009), people initiate and participate in conversations, they are empowered to provide and share what they have with tools like YouTube, Flickr and Twitter where they share opinions, videos, photos and much more (Brito, 2007).

Community: Its the belonging to a community where people talk, connect and communicate with each other (Burns & Bahnisch, 2009); and what makes community such an important aspect is the human desire to become a part of a group (Brussee & Hekman, 2009). Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn are places where people can join and enjoy the benefits of a community.

Openness: Openness has technological, social and economical meanings; the social term, which is the one related to the study, is the public nature and public exposure, that anyone can access the content and reach it (Brussee & Hekman, 2009), others interept it as being open and transparent with people and the audience to build trust and long-term relationships (Brito, 2007). Being public also means that content is visible and searchable even from people who are not members of the community, as in YouTube. (Burns & Bahnisch, 2009)
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Conversation: Social media is about conversation and engaging people, where it replaces tight controls, and foster building relationships and participation (Meadow-Klue, 2007); people are able to communicate with each other and talk (Constantinide, 2008), give comments and leave feedbacks and freely express their opinions (teens) as in commenting systems in YouTube, blogs and Facebook.

Customization Democratization User-control: Democratization is described as generating content, copying, sharing, editing, syndicating, reproducing and re-mixing information (Constantinides, 2008); users have control over their content and can control what they want to see and opt-out what they dont want. (Mola, 2008)

All these characteristics have changed how content is created and delivered, the media supply chain model is still the same, but the players have changed; except being the consumer of the content, people now have two roles as producers and consumers. (Burns & Bahnisch, 2009).

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(Burns & Bahnisch, 2009, P4)

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Social Media Channels

Blogs
Blog, a short of two words, web blog, is a diary placed on the internet, maintained by one or more (Hewitt, 2005), where one can write about anything; politics, art, science, culture, personal diaries and experiments (Burstein, 2006), and entries written are sorted in reverse chronological order. Blogs became a major source for providing information; its importance and wide-spread usage came from its engaging nature and community characteristic (Kolari et al, 2007), because people can place comments for any content and discuss it with the writer, which had helped reaching audiences that couldnt have been reached with traditional non-engaging channels. (Wright and Hill, 2007) There are many types of blogs depending on purpose; the two major types are personal blogs written by individuals, and corporate blogs written and maintained by corporate representatives (Sarkkinen, 2009). Examples of global corporations maintaining blogs are Coca-cola and Google.

Social Networks
A social network as defined by Pew/Internet, is an online location where a user can create a profile and build a personal network that connects him or her to other users (social networking pdf); people
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meet and share interests, learn about each others skills, preferences and talents, they interact in various ways by chatting, emailing, video and photo sharing and discussing different topics. (Stroud, 2007). While some major social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are general-purpose networks, meaning people of all interests and places use them, others are directed toward a niche of people with mutual interests (eg. Banking social networks) or to people within specific geographical area.(Button and Partridge, 2007) Social networks play big role when it comes to word-of-mouth communication, (Brown, 2007) people in social networks trust each other and accept others opinions; an example is how online book reviews affects sales of the book (Stephen, 2009). Examples of general purpose social networks are Facebook, Twitter; professional social networks like LinkedIn; and Flixter, the social movie rating site.

Podcasting
Podcasting is one of the fast growing new technologies that became part of everyones lives, with its convenience and 24 hours availability. (Shim et al, 2006), it is described as delivering media contents, both audio and video, to media devices; anyone can create an audio or video content users can get via internet and can subscribe to via RSS feed to receive updates. (Torrone, 2005). Podcasts are sometimes described as talk shows and radio stations which have a benefit for users that they can be downloaded at anytime. (Housley, NA), with great portability. Nowadays, podcasts have become popular for delivering universities lectures, general lessons, spread an idea and marketing messages. Not only are they used for external communications, but companies use podcasts also as internal communication medium. (Communications book)

Video & Photo Sharing

Video sharing giant YouTube had became an important communication tool, especially after Google bought it, that doesnt apply only to YouTube, but also to other video sharing sites such as Yahoo Videos and Metacafe. (Bullas, 2009)
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Video sharing sites allow anyone to upload his own videos and let anyone to see them, with a commentary system so viewers can leave comments and interact with both publisher and other viewers. Just like other social media channels, video sharing empowers creativity of customers and encourages social interaction. (Cha, 2009) Photo sharing has almost the same concept as video sharing; people can store, search and share their own photos with the world, or to a private group of people, and viewers can leave comments on the photos. (Zwol, 2007) A special feature found in photo sharing sites is tagging, which is a description for a photo with keywords; this had made categorizing a photo an easy job, and made it easier to find them, or even direct a photo to someone by tagging it with the persons name. (Chastain, NA)

Social Media and Consumers

Number of internet users has increased exponentially for many reasons, and the users of social media sites have grown even faster because what these technologies offer them; users are now producers rather than just consumers, they control what they see and they interact with both people and messages. (Boone et al, 2007) With social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other sites, people lives are more like an open book; people talk about themselves and declare their identities, and know more about other people; and it doesnt stop there; users engagement and participation with social media empowers them to do more like never before, people share their stories with friends on Facebook, they create their own movies, videos and publish them to the world on YouTube, they even can create their own social networks easily for their interests on Ning. On the level of Palestine, social media sites are taking over the internet usage; according to Alexa.com statistics, Facebook, the giant social network was ranked between second and third most visited site in past months, while YouTube was ranked between fourth and fifth most visited site in the past months.
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Social Media Marketing

With the introduction of Web 2.0, and peoples crush to use these empowering sites, it was unavoidable that marketers will seek to use these sites for businesses benefit. Many reasons had driven marketers toward social media; needs of people have evolved, social media tools interactive ways of reading and writing surfaced forming new needs for readers and forcing marketers to adjust to peoples needs. ( company blog ); the nature and aspects of the new media itself was a drive for marketers to use them, with the huge benefits it offered to marketers, and customers already existing there. (Blaylock, 2007) Social media marketing is simply the use of social sites in different ways, and the creation of contents and messages through social sites for the purpose of becoming viral and benefiting the business; social media marketing is different than social media optimization as Mola described in that social media optimization is how a website is organized, layout is changed to make it easier for visitors to read and share contents, while social media marketing is the methods marketers use sites like Ning, Facebook, blogs and podcasting to spread their messages and reach both current and potential customers and stakeholders. (Mola, 2008) Because of the special aspects of social media, marketers need additional and new approaches to use these technologies, and need to rebuild their existing marketing mix to integrate and take advantage of such aspects; they should think of it as strategic framework and use it on long-term rather than traditional temporary marketing efforts. (Meadows-Klue, 2007) Marketing on the social web have many advantages over traditional marketing; because of its nature, social media engages people more, empowers them and make them feel like they are in charge (Boone et al, 2007), which leads to a viral marketing and make the good-crafted messages spread faster and reach more people. Unlike traditional messages, on the social web the message is pushed only once, then it spreads by users and goes viral. (Mola, 2008)

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Social media had changed customers attitudes; brands will get recommended only by earning trust of friends, and by getting more personal with customers. Some studies were conducted and proven that social media affects marketing outcomes in different ways, an example is users and readers recommendations on new books; it was noticed that when recommendations of users in social networks and blogs were generally good, sales of the book increased, and if the recommendations were bad, sales decreased, a finding that supports the shift of trust to friends and suggests that all marketing channels and messages, including social media, should be integrated because they affect each other. (Stephen, 2009) Another research published as whitepaper Social Media Marketing Industry Report, found that most marketers are new to the social media industry, but they realized how important it is for dealing with customers; of the surveyed marketers, %88 are already using social media for their businesses. According to the whitepaper, benefits of using social media marketing we listed and categorized in the following chart:

(Stelzner, 2009, P14)

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and the top used social media tools were Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook. (Stelzner, 2009)

Social Media Marketing Tactics & Practices

Social media marketing is less than five years old, and so there is no standard tactics and practices that can be used to obtain desirable outcomes. Many researchers have listed and categorized some of the tactics in different ways. Costantinidis had categorized social media marketing efforts into two ways or strategies:
1. The passive way: or the use of social media as intelligence tool

to know more about customers and collect market information.

2. The active way: which is to use social media sites and tools as

channels for public relations, advertising direct marketing, events announcements and policy updates, and to engage the customer and interact with him. (Costantinidis, 2007) Many companies use social media for marketing intelligence; Google monitors blogs to collect information about their customers and trends, while AT&T maintains a video channel on YouTube and a fan page on Facebook to interact with its customers. (Kim, 2008) Mola had suggested more five more specific categories that all social media tactics fall under:
1. Declaration of Identity: it is how a business talks about itself

in social media channels and declares its values; mostly presented in a companys profile in social networks or About Us page in blogs and websites.
2. Identity through Association: it is when the customer

associate himself with the brand, as in adding a company as friend on Facebook, or using social bookmarking sites.
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3. User-initiated Conversation: with these techniques, the

customer is given the chance to ask questions, and the company can respond. Some social sites made specifically for this purpose are GetSatisfaction and Ning.
4. Producer-initiated Conversation: here, the company starts

the conversation to find out what customers love, want and think, and to seek feedback from them.
5. In-Person Interaction: these tactics suggests that when

interaction online reaches a good level, these relationships should become more personal, and should meet customers faceto-face to build conversation, seek collaboration with them. (Mola, 2008) Another more detailed classification, listing about 80 ways to use social media categorized into six groups (can be applied more to Twitter) which are:
1. Build Credibility (eg. Share opinions with customers or mention

awards youve won)

2. Market Your Business (eg. Highlight employees or show the

companys human face) 3. Grow Ears (eg. Track conversations about your brand for online reputation management)
4. Grow your Online Network (eg. Connect more personally with

contacts)
5. Grow your Offline Network (eg. Offer coupons to encourage

making instore purchases) 6. Have Fun (eg. Find new blog topic ideas) (Barone, 2010)

Using some of these tactics could help improve any business and marketing efforts, but only if some practices were followed, such as encouraging and cultivating interaction with customer on all levels
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(articleemerg), and better understand community rules and culture. (blackout)

Conclusion
In this literature review, the researcher discussed social media from different perspectives, focusing on the social side of it, and showed how social media is affecting both consumers and marketers way of life and conducting business. Though this review was technical to some extent, but it was necessary to explain these terms to understand the concepts of social media. This literature review not only focuses on social media from general perspective, but also shows how it will become the next big thing and the next evolution of marketing and for the relationships between consumers and businesses; the consumers are already using social media sites, they talk about businesses in good and bad ways whether businesses like that or not; and now its businesses turn whether they will step forward and join the conversation, or they will stand away afraid to experience the new thing.

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Chapter Three

METHODOLOGY

*Data sources: data were collected using two methods: Secondary data: the researcher had studied the subject and collected information and past studies from books, journals,
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trusted websites, online social media articles and social media sites of selected companies. Primary data: Sample size and type: the targeted sample was 25 local of all sizes; the basic criteria for choosing the sample was having a website, as this basically shows how they feel about internet marketing in general The selected companies fall under four sectors:

Data sources and research methods: to conduct the study and collect information on the selected companies, three methods were used: 1. Structured questionnaires: a structured questionnaire were prepared as the major tool for collecting required data and divided into four sectors to measure: perception toward social media, personal usage and knowledge on social media, social media tools and channels used by companies and social media tactics and uses by local companies. 2. Unstructured interviews: follow-up unstructured questions were asked only for companies that the researcher could personally interview and fill the questionnaire with one of the marketing staff.
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3. Social media presence: a review and study of selected

companies social media sites (Facebook, Twitter and blogs) were conducted to both double check some of the questionnaire answers and gain deeper knowledge on their social media presence.

*Limitations: the strongest limitation was companies unwillingness to help and give some of their time for meeting the researcher, and their not-open strategy with dealing with researchers. Another problem was that all surveyed companies were in Ramallah; because of time limitation the researcher couldn't reach companies outside Ramallah & Al-Bireh or survey larger number of companies.

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Chapter Four

FINDINGS

Part One: Statements (Likert Scale) Q2.1

I'm willing to take risks in my marketing campaign and try new ways of marketing
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As we can see, most companies said that they are willing to take risks in their marketing campaigns and try new ways and new untraditional campaigns. If we look at the marketing and advertisements activities, from billboards, TV ads, radio, etc, it's obvious that most of local marketing campaigns are traditional, almost all the same; we can conculude that taking risks concept for most marketers here is not trying new things and be creative rather than changing simple, small details in their marketing campaigns.

Q2.2

Internet is a good tool for marketing

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85% of surveyed companies agreed on that Internet is a good marketing tool; this result was expected because almost all surveyed companies have websites. From this question, we can conclude that there is a general trend toward online marketing and online advertising. Unstructured question: a question was asked to some companies of whether they feel there is a benefit from their usage of internet for marketing; the answers were mixed, where some thought that internet is very beneficial for them to reach all their segments, some said internet is good only with the young customers segment but not the senior citizens.

Q2.3

I think social media sites are good only for fun & socializing
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The results of this question were mixed; half of the surveyed companies think social media sites are purely made for fun, gaming, and its usage is mostly waste of time, while the other half believe that social media sites can be used as a learning environment and for conducting business and marketing activities along besides the social and fun side.

Q2.4

I prohibit access to social networking sites in my company domain

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Most companies surveyed allow access and usage of social media sites in them (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc), but: All companies that allow social media usage within their domain are whether small companies who have small number of employees or they manage the business as family, or manufacturers who doesn't have many Desktop positions or computers in the plant. The 30% of companies who prohibit social media access are all large-sized service companies, including Jawwal, Al-Wataniya and banks; this 30% reflects the situation in all local large-sized service companies and some middle-sized.

Q2.5

I have knowledge and know how to use social media sites

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All companies surveyed (marketing personnel of the company) said they use social media sites and have good share of knowledge in using social media. A follow-up question was asked to get deeper insights about such knowledge, and it appeared that about 85% of users knowledge were limited to Facebook and YouTube, and only 15% have knowledge on how to use Twitter or Blogs.

Q2.6

I think social media can be used to benefit my business

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This question was asked to get a look over what marketers think of social media, and if it can benefit their businesses. From the result above we can notice: 65% of surveyed marketers believe social media can be used to help their businesses, whether in marketing or as human resource management tool, but this percentage is 15% larger than who agree with question 2.3 statement (I think social media sites are good only for fun & socializing); this indicates that the answers are not all true and compatible, though the researcher tried hard to get the best and true answers. Most marketers think, in a way or another, that social media can benefit their businesses because large number of the Palestinian population of all ages are already using and are in social media sites.

Q2.7

I encourage open conversations with both my customers and employees

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75% said that their companies encourage open conversations and try to open communication channels with their customers and employees. This statement results are doubted and may be biased, because no company's representative will say that their company doesn't support and encourage open conversations, especially because of their fear of information to go to the administration and management.

Q2.8

I encourage my customers to participate with me and talk about me

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Q2.9

I try to tightly control my company's image

Part Two: Social media consumption and usage Q3

Have you ever personally used social media?

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Q4

Have you ever noticed your brand was mentioned in one of the social media sites?

Q5

Please rank your knowledge in social media in general i.e., how familiar are you with various forms of social media and how they are used.
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Questions 3,4,5 are closely related; in this section the researcher tried to get an overview on personal usage and knowledge in social media. As noted above, there is no one who never used social media; a large percentage of surveyed marketers use social media sites at least two to three times a day, and a large percentage said they have a good know-how to use social media. A note here is that the know-how was rated mostly for Facebook and YouTube; other platforms such as blogs, Twitter were rarely used by marketers & users, therefore they are opted-out of this section. In question 4, more than half of marketers said they have noticed and saw their company's name, and products brand names mentioned in social media sites; This means that as international studies already found out, customers are using social media sites to talk about their experiences with companies and products, and this shows how important is to follow social media to see what is being said about you there. Because of this that Palestinian marketers started to realize the importance of social media as marketing tool and started paying attention and gearing powers toward it. Q6

Ranking of advertisement vehicles and channels

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This chart shows marketers preferences for selected media channels (TV, Newspapers, Magazines, Radio & Internet). As seen above, the general preference for marketers is more geared toward Radio and Newspapers; Radio is one of the most reachable channels in Palestine because everybody use it, so it's natural to be the most used vehicle for advertising, while TV is the least used, because of the weak users consumption of local TV channels. As rated above, Internet's position is not strong among other channels, where it's rated between 4th and 5th most used channels, a little better than TV; the reason for this, as marketers said, is because the Internet is more used by the younger people segment, while older generations don't use it, at least not much enough to satisfy using it for reaching these segments, and some marketers said that while the Internet is not good for marketing purposes in Palestine now, it will be one of the strongest channels between 7-10 years. Q7

Businesses presence on social media

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20

Yes 11

No 9

Services 7

Manufacturers 3

Retailers 1

One person in the marketing department of 20 companies were surveyed; of those companies, eleven companies have presence in social media, while 9 don't have.

Part Three: Social media channels Q8

Social media vehicles used

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Channel Facebook fan page/group YouTube Twitter Blogs Podcasts Photo sharing Wiki pages

Number of companies 11 1 2 0 0 0 0

All companies that use social media are using Facebook as the main vehicle, and that's because Facebook is the single most used social network used in Palestine, it's ranked the second most visited website (April) in Palestine according to Alexa.com. While YouTube was ranked the fifth according to Alexa.com, only one company used it by making a video about the company and uploading it on YouTube. Twitter, although not well-known in Palestine, but it's one of the best social media tools for marketing purposes. Blogs, Podcasts, Photo sharing and Wiki pages weren't used at all by any company, and even while wiki pages (eg. Wikipedia) are very famous on the Internet, especially when searching for a term in a search engine, but none of marketers ever thought of creating, editing or participating in a wiki page.

Part Four: Social media marketing tactics Q9

Tactics and marketing methods used on social media

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Tactic

Number of compani es that use the tactic 3

Listen to and monitor what customers & competitors say about my brand Listen in and track information about my industry Answer common customer questions/ conversation with customers Mention awards Ive won or accreditations Ive earned/ Promote upcoming speaking engagements Talk about my business (talk about culture, employees, recent news and announcements ) Offer discounts, coupons or special offers to customers who find you via social media Directly show my products and use it for advertisements Share tips and info that may be interesting and useful to my customers Build and online community Talk about my new products Entertainment/ Having fun To more engage customers / or hold contests

1 3

5 2

1 5 2 1

As seen in the previous table, most companies concentrate and use "direct advertising" methods where they post billboard or radio ads directly to their pages without any modification; this method is not
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effective as it doesn't consider the special features and characteristics of social media. The more effective indirect methods for using social media, such as sharing tips with customers, is used by only few number of companies, while only one company is really trying to gather customers around its social media sites.

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Chapter Five

Conclusion & Recommendation s

Conclusion
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After conducting the research, answering the research questions and getting more insights into social media marketing in Palestine, the most notable findings and results were: Although more than half of the surveyed companies use social media sites for marketing, but these uses are mostly very limited; As noted in questions results, most marketers not only use only Facebook, but also they don't even know the other social media tools despite their importance, commercial and marketing benefits. Almost all social media marketing initiatives were in early stages; two of the surveyed companies have Facebook fan pages with no single post! Some don't respond to customer's comments, and most of them, as shown back in results of the questionnaire, just post their billboard or radio advertisement directly in their walls, exactly as they are, without any modification to suit the nature and characteristics of social media, which is very ineffective.

From the unstructured questions, about three companies had their Facebook pages created and maintained informally (eg. A nonmarketing employee is responsible for Bank of Palestine fan page, and the son of Sinnokrot company owner is responsible for their fan page), which shows how important it is to encourage and empower both, employees and non-employees to talk about the company, and giving them the tools to do that; but these abilities and initiatives will be limited for companies prohibiting access to social media sites in their domains. Finally, there is no true relationship marketing present on Palestine; all businesses seek to sell customers on short-term basis, not to create long-term profitable relations, and direct selling methods are used.

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Recommendations
1. Marketers should seek to more engage the customers, make conversations with them
2. Companies should become more open, encouraging both their

customers and employees to talk about them, not only by continuously seeking conversations with them, but also by giving them the means to do that, and make it easy for customers and employees to talk about them 3. Marketers should start taking risks in their marketing campaigns, and be more creative
4. When having a presence in social media, you shouldn't ignore it;

being away of social media is better than having a presence with no participating! Leaving your Facebook fan page, Twitter profile or your Blog with no monitoring and answering customers comments and questions will lead to what is called "World Wide Rant" where the benefits and powers of using social media will become disadvantages for the company and lead to reputation corruption.
5. Make customers fall in love with you; relationship marketing and

long-term profitable relationships are the best ways for any business to operate and profit.

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30. Blaylock. E (2007). Corporate Marketing in Second Life. Social Media

Marketing Symposium

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Appendences

Questionnaire
48

Part 1
Q1. Which of the following best describes your business?
1. Wholesaler 4. Manufacturing 2. Retailer 3. Service

Q2. Please read the following statements and specify your level of
agreement with each Strong ly Agree 1 Im willing to take risks in my marketing campaigns and try new ways of marketing Internet is a good tool for marketing I think social media sites are good only for fun and socializing I prohibit access to social networks sites in my company domain I feel threatened if a customer talks bad about me in public I have knowledge and know how to use social media sites I think social media can be used to benefit my business I encourage open conversations with both my customers and employees Agre e No opinio n Disagr ee Strong ly Disagr ee

2 3

7 8

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I encourage my customers to participate with me and talk about me

Q3. Have you ever personally used social media (i.e., read an online forum or
posted a message to an online forum, submitted comments to a blog or written a blog post, edited a wiki, etc.)? Yes, FREQUENTLY Yes, OCCASIONALLY INFREQUENTLY

No, NEVER

Q4. Have you ever noticed your brand was mentioned in one of the social media sites? o Yes How did you feel about it? ___________________________________________

o No Q5. Please rank your knowledge of social media in general i.e., how familiar
are your with various forms of social media and how they are used? I have a LOT of knowledge I have SOME knowledge I have very LITTLE knowledge I have NO knowledge

Q6. From your own point of view, Rate on a (1-5) scale the following media
types from the most interesting type to the least interesting one in presenting advertisements and for marketing - Television advertisements - Newspaper advertisements 50

- Magazines advertisements - Radio advertisements - Internet advertisements

Q7. Does your business use social media for marketing, or currently belong
to any social networking sites? (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, Blog, etc) o o Yes No

Please answer part 2 only if your answer for Question 7 was Yes Part 2
Q8. Check the box for the vehicles that you use (you can check
multiple boxes)

Facebook group/fan page YouTube video Twitter updates Maintain a blog Run a podcast/Radio show Gallery/Share photos

Q9. How do use social media? (you can check multiple boxes)
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Listen to and monitor what customers & competitors say about my brand Listen in and track information about my industry Answer common customer questions/ conversation with customers Mention awards Ive won or accreditations Ive earned/ Promote upcoming speaking engagements Talk about my business (talk about culture, employees, recent news and announcements ) Offer discounts, coupons or special offers to customers who find you via social media Directly show my products and use it for advertisements Share tips and info that may be interesting and useful to my customers Build and online community Talk about my new products Entertainment/ Having fun To more engage customers / or hold contests

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53