Annotated Bibliography on Social Media Marketing Research

Research Questions:

• How does social media marketing and user-generated content marketing add value to a business?
• Is there a difference to how value is added with these marketing tactics when looking at Business-to-Business scenarios versus Business-to-Consumer scenarios?
• What are the drawbacks of social media marketing and why do certain industries feel reluctant to implement these tactics?
• How important is social media marketing and UGC marketing for millennials and younger audiences, including young firms? 
• Looking closer at just the Financial Services industry, does the lack of social media marketing impact the views towards the industry from the younger audience? How can increasing the use of social media and UGC affect the future of the industry?

Source 1:

Citation

MARKETING'S NEW FRONTIER. (2014). Convenience Store Decisions, 25(5), 14.

Summary

The information from the article clip discusses the findings from Crowdtap and Ispos, titled “Social Influence: Marketing’s New Frontier.” The study reported 30% of time spent by Millennials in their daily lives are with content created or presented by their peers such as status updates, blogs and social media posts. It also reports that Millennials trusts User-generated content 40% more than traditional media sources. “53% of Millennials said UGC had influenced their purchase decisions, while only 44% listed traditional media.”

Evaluation

This article is only a paragraph long and serves to summarize results from mentioned research. It does well to sum up information to help directly distinguish the how Millennials feel about UGC marketing vs Traditional media but does not add much backing. Not much information is given in regards to “purchase decisions” and the kind of products these Millennials were buying or marketed to. It does not discuss the difference between Millennials and Non-Millennials. No mention on whether the distinguished results between UCG vs Traditional only applies to this specific demographic. This article also does not add much value in the argument of whether UCG marketing is industry specific. Since this article is a segment from the Convenience Store Decisions’ InfoMarketing newsletter, it could be biased towards presenting data that is only relevant to specifically the Consumer Goods industry.

Usefulness

As mentioned, this article does well to quickly summarize the benefits of UCG marketing for millennials vs traditional marketing. It will allow me to use the quantitative data from the results of the research mentioned in the article to back up my report.

Source 2:

Citation

CAMPBELL, C., COHEN, J., & JUNZHAO, M. (2014). Advertisements Just Aren't Advertisements Anymore: A New Typology for Evolving Forms of Online "Advertising". Journal Of Advertising Research, 54(1), 7-10. doi:10.2501/JAR-54-1-007-010