Elaine

Nowadays, many companies are using social medias as business tools to market their products and services.

With easy-to-publish web tools such as blogs, forums, rating site, and social networks, individuals can openly and honestly provide opinions, thoughts and engage in discussions about products or services they frequently use. The barriers to entry are internet access and basic tool knowledge.

The car manufacturer Toyota has launched a site at toyota.com/hybrids for hybrid owners, giving the proud owners of its hybrid vehicles their very own social network in order to better do so by inviting them to create profiles of their reasons for owning a hybrid vehicle. Like other social networks, such as Myspace and Facebook, the site allows hybrid owners to post videos, share photos and discuss their reasons for buying and driving a hybrid vehicle as to give some statistics about themselves and their vehicles.

By providing a space for owners to group together by attributes like age and even vehicle color, Toyota has an opportunity to reach them with targeted messages in the future and by eventually inviting them to contribute to its advertisement.

Social Media empowers anyone to publish their voice and to be easily heard. For negative customer feedback, it will be a disruption of products or services, and an opportunity for positive customer feedback.

In future, decision makers will primarily have to rely on their social networks to communicate with customers in order to improve products or offer better services. It gives customers more power and allows companies to spend less in marketing.

Moussa