Fachartikel
Marketing Communication to and with Net Citizens: Targeting by Me...

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

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.