Social Media Marketing and Value Co-Creation

Abstract

Nowadays social media and brand communities provide virtual places where the consumers can publicize their opinions about products and services and play an active role as marketers, advertisers, value creators through electronic word-of-mouth. Since most of the times these dynamics flow out of business control, in order to pursue firms' objectives, managers and marketers operating in many sectors look at the web social community with growing interest. The present chapter presents a system-wide analysis of the links and feedback mechanisms between the different aspects of value co-creation through social media marketing and brand communities. For the purpose, it is proposed a qualitative model built according to the principles of System Dynamics, a computer-aided methodology for policy analysis and design. Causal loop & stock-and-flows structures integrate the socioeconomic feedbacks between key variables, selected according to relevant literature, social media and brand communities observations, interview to consumer influencers.