Research Methods Assignment.

Name: Otto Tawanda Chisiri

30 July 2017

Research Topic: “ Influencing the customer journey: how social media can be
used to engage and retain customers”

Journal Artcile Reviewed: 1.

Dos Santos, F. and Oliveira, J. (2014) “More than Just a Game: The Power of Social Media

on Super Bowl XLVI”. Social Networking, Vol.3 No.2, February 2014, pp142-145.

Journal Article Reviewed: 2.

Hamid AB, Noor R; Akhir R; Cheng A. Y. (2013) “Social media: an emerging dimension of

marketing communication” Journal of Management & Marketing Research; Vol. 12 February

2013,

Journal Article Review .

The two articles above were reviewed as part of the literature review of the proposed

research topic “Influencing the customer journey: how social media can be used to

engage and retain customers” and were chosen for their relevance to the topic. The first

article, “More than Just a Game: The Power of Social Media on Super Bowl XLVI”, by Dos

Santos, F. and Oliveira, J. (2014) seeks to show how changes in the media evolution has

impacted the society. The article also seek to bring an understaing on the impact of social

media applications and their impact on how society thinks and lives.

As Nicole A. Buzzetto-More 2013 puts it across about the effect of technology peopel have

been,
 Compelled to receive constant information updates from their ever expanding peer

networks, the average person has been transformed to a hyper-connected habitué of

social media.

As such it important to measure the impact of how social media and the evolution in

concumer thinking and behaviours has neccesiatted advertisers to change the way the

companies makert their products. Dos Santos, F. and Oliveira, J. (2014)

From the results and data provided by the research we can conclude that social media plays

a paramount role in engaging customers as shown by an increase of 461% on bridgestone

twitter followers. The challenge of the article is that it does not show the conversion rate of

the followers or likes on facebook into the actual buys’ being made. In other words without

being able to translate likes and followers into actual purachsing action the numbers will only

sound nice on paper without any real value to the business. So there is need to develop tools

to measure the conversion rates.

The second article reviwed, “Social media: an emerging dimension of marketing

communication” Hamid AB, etal. (2013) seek to understand the underlying realtionship

between social media and trust, social media and retention as well as the relationship

between trust and retention. By examining these articles the researcher sought to have an

in-depth understanding of how social media can be used be used to influence the customer

journey in making a purchase and create loyalty. According to Hamid AB, et al (2013), “The

advent of new technology such as the social media has penetrated many households and

altered the way customers seek information as the basis for their purchase decisions.” To

prove that statement they carried a study to find out how university students make holiday

purchasing decision. The researcher also sought to seek the if realationship among, use

social media, trust and retention are directly correlated. It is clear from the article that this
is no simple issue. Moreover, other inferential statistic such as regression analysis as well

multivariate analysis may need to be applied to further provide in-depth understanding in the

subject matter. Hamid AB, etal. (2013)

The drawback of the research is the sample was too cosmopolitanand technologiclly savvy

to be a true represenative of holoday makers. The researcher also did not include and

evaluate customer experience of pre, actual and post hotel visits in order to ascertain the

relationships of variables under study Hamid AB, etal. (2013)

From the above articles the author is conviced that social media can expolited to influnce

customer journey.
Bibliography:

Buzzetto-More Nicole A, (2013). “Social Media and Prosumerism” Issues in Informing Science
and Information Technology, Volume 10, 2013 [online] Available at:
http://iisit.org/Vol10/IISITv10p067-080Buzzetto0040.pdf [Accessed 30 Jul. 2017].

Dos Santos, F. and Oliveira, J. (2014) “More than Just a Game: The Power of Social Media
on Super Bowl XLVI”. Social Networking, Vol.3 No.2, February 2014, pp142-145. Available
at: (http://www.scirp.org/journal)/sn)http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sn.2014.32018 [Accessed on
29-07-2017]

Hamid AB, Noor Raihan; Akhir R; Cheng A. Y. (2013) “Social media: an emerging dimension
of marketing communication” Journal of Management & Marketing Research; Vol. 12
February 2013, p4. Available at: http://www.aabri.com/manuscripts/121420.pdf [Accessed
on 29-07-2017]