Marketing Ang Social Networking

Counting Comments:

A critical appraisal of the evaluation of social media campaigns by UK digital marketing practitioners.

Brendan J. Keegan Submitted to: RIBM Doctoral Symposium 2011 30th-31st March

Director of Studies: Prof. Jenny Rowley

Brendan J. Keegan Manchester Metropolitan University Business School Aytoun Street Aytoun Building Manchester M1 3GH Tel: +44(0)161 247 3835 E-Mail: b.keegan@mmu.ac.uk

1 Brendan J. Keegan

Abstract: This research aims to explore the evaluation approaches by digital marketing practitioners when employing social media as part of multichannel campaigns. The inclusion of social media within the integrated marketing communications paradigm suggests the traditional evaluation dogma can be transposed onto this relatively new approach. The dearth of work performed on practitioner approach in this area will be supplanted by previous work into traditional evaluation in marketing communications. Through engaged action research, this work will examine the challenges encountered with a view to conceptualising research implications. The absence of universally agreed evaluatory criteria within social media campaigns has been identified as a gap in academic knowledge and is hence offered up for academic scrutiny. It is envisaged that work will seek to understand further how practitioners evaluate campaigns and the levels of innovation within these processes. Keywords: Social Media, Digital Marketing, Marketing Communications, Evaluation, Measurement

Introduction to the research Modern web innovation and technological prowess has been well documented in recent years as being the catalyst for modern digital marketing techniques and approaches (Moran & Gossieaux 2010; Kim 2008; Riegner 2007; Ferguson 2008; Trusov et al. 2009). The emergence of social media as a constituent channel of Pickton's (1999) integrated marketing communications paradigm has also led to the need for an investigation into whether traditional techniques can be...