Social media marketing in Vietnam A study of consumer profiles Marketing sử dụng truyền thông xã hội tại Việt Nam nghiên cứu hồ sơ người tiêu dùng

Methodology for consumer research for social media users in Vietnam 20 2.1.. Consumer analysis and recommended entry strategy for marketing management into social media .... The influenc

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

TRAN THI THU TRANG

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IN VIETNAM

A STUDY OF CONSUMER PROFILES

Major: Business Administration

Code: 60 34 05

MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION THESIS

Supervisor: Dr Tran Doan Kim

Hanoi – Oct 2011

TABLE OF CONTENT

Introduction 1

Motivations 1

Goals and Scope 2

Limitations 3

Chapter 1 Review of social media marketing 4

1.1 Concepts in social media marketing 4

1.1.1 Word-of-mouth 5

1.1.2 User-generated content and Web 2.0 6

1.1.3 Social technographic ladders 6

1.1.4 User-centered marketing communication 7

1.2 Social media types 8

1.2.1 Blogs 8

1.2.2 Chatting software and microblogging 9

1.2.3 Forums 10

1.2.4 Social news, social bookmarking and content aggregators 10

1.2.5 Social network sites 11

1.2.6 Media sharing and content communities 11

1.2.7 Integrated and mobile social media 13

1.3 More on social media marketing practices 14

1.4 Social media and social media marketing in Vietnam 16

1.4.1 Social media landscape 16

1.4.2 Social media marketing 18

Chapter 2 Methodology for consumer research for social media users in Vietnam 20 2.1 Review of existing research 20

2.1.1 Thesis of (Ivanauskas, 2009) for the UK market 20

2.1.2 Thesis of (Khan, 2009) for markets of Italia, Spain, Pakistan and Uzbekistan 22

2.2 Research strategy 23

2.2.1 Questionnaire design 23

2.2.2 Data collection process 24

Chapter 3 Consumer analysis and recommended entry strategy for marketing management into social media 27

3.1 Consumer analysis 27

3.1.1 The consumer profile of web 2.0 citizen in Vietnam 27

3.1.2 User patterns in interaction with company 33

3.1.3 The profile of Vietnam social media users – an overview 38

3.1.4 The profile of Vietnam social media users – a deeper look 40

3.1.5 The influence of social media on Vietnamese consumers in marketing communication 47

3.1.6 Findings 54

3.2 Recommended strategy for marketing management into social media 58

Conclusion and Future Work 61

References 63

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 3.1: Gender distribution of respondents 27

Figure 3.2: Distribution of age groups 28

Figure 3.3: Income distribution amount respondents 29

Figure 3.4: Average rank of social media services in terms of popularity (the higher rank – the more popular - means the smaller numerical value) 30

Figure 3.5: Distribution of places and locations 31

Figure 3.6: Distribution in usage time per week 32

Figure 3.7: Usage time among young people per week 33

Figure 3.8: Preference of content types 33

Figure 3.9: Reasons for users to start a conversation with company 34

Figure 3.10: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company 35

Figure 3.11: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company, among the age groups 35

Figure 3.12: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company, among the genders 36

Figure 3.13: the personal reason to participate in conversation or interact with the company through social media applications 37

Figure 3.14: The main obstacles to interact with the company through Social Media Sites 37

Figure 3.15: Roles playing among respondents (a person may play multiple roles) 38

Figure 3.16: Roles playing by US users (Source: Forrester Research) 38

Figure 3.17: Role distribution of the two age groups 15-24 and 25-34 39

Figure 3.18: Online behavior with respect to genders 40

Figure 3.19: Preferences of content when Creators interact with the company 41

Figure 3.20: What Creators will do after interacting with the company 41

Figure 3.21: Social media that belong to the top two choices among Creators 42

Figure 3.22: Time spent on social media sites by Creators and Critics 43

Figure 3.23: Personal gains for using social media among Critics and Collectors 44

Figure 3.24: Preferences of content in interaction with the company by Joiners 45

Figure 3.25: Main obstacles that stop Joiners from joining social media sites 46

Figure 3.26: Reasons for interacting with the company by Joiners and Spectators 46 Figure 3.27: Preferences of content when Spectators interact with the company 47

Figure 3.28: What users may do after interacting with the company through social media services 48

Figure 3.29: User responses to the question whether the company should contact them for marketing purposes 50

Figure 3.30: Media and their powers of influencing customer‟s mind 53

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1.3: Online community needs Source: Ivanauskas (2009) 7

Table 1.1: How social media tools will meet business goals, Henna (2009) 14

Table 1.2: Opportunities and challenges of social media, Henna (2009) 16

Table 1.4: Why the Vietnamese go online? (Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook 2010, citing from Cimigo Netcitizens) 17

Table 3.1: Correlation between social media types used and expected outcomes after company-consume interaction (the numbers are the count of responses) 49

Table 3.2: Correlation between social media choice and responses to marketing purposes 51

Table 3.3: Preferences of commercial messages with respect to media choices and origin of the messages 52

Table 3.4: Technographics with respect to ads on different media 54

Table 3.6: Summary of Vietnamese technographics 57

Introduction

Motivations

With the advent of Internet in the last quarter of the 20th century and the public availability of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the digital landscape has completely changed Access to a massive amount of information is just a click away Communication is made easy – we can now send emails to colleagues, perform instant chats with friends, or even make long distant calls at the rate that was not previously possible

In the last few years, the change has been more profound – users are no longer a passive consumer of existing Web content, they are actively creating new content and sharing it The change has resulted in a fairly firm body of knowledge known

as social media (sometimes, the citizen media) As the name suggested, this new

media is characterized by the social dimensions – the many-to-many interactivity between users and the content being generated by the users rather than the traditional publishers According to Zarrella (2010), there are more than 346 million people who read blogs and more than 184 million people are bloggers themselves The move catches the attention of the general public by the constant appearance of new buzzwords For example, the word-of-the-year was “Blog” in

2004, “Podcast” in 2005, “Facebook” in 2007, and “Unfriend” in 2009 (New Oxford American Dictionary)

This poses great challenges and opportunities for both businesses and academia

to study this fast changing cultural and social phenomenon It is important to understand the users of the new media One of the most profound changes in users is the shift from being the audience of the media to being the media themselves Thus the access to users is made easier, but the users have so much power in generating the content, filtering out the messages, defining how the messages will be passed Social interaction is redefined substantially since there

are virtually no constraints on geography, physical presense in any conversation, and on the number of audiences The only limitations are perhaps the amount of information processed by a typical user for a period of time, the difficulty of cross-language communication, and the privacy concerns when going online

The nature of new communication methods asks for a new look for the area of marketing In particular, we need to characterize the users as well as the ways messages are generated, transmitted and received For example, the nature of word-of-mouth communication gives rise to two broad categories of users: opinion leaders and opinion seekers (Gilly et al, 1980) A deeper look at the nature of online usage, five types of users can be recognized: those who create the content, those who make comment on content, those who simply join the social network, those who collect and share the content and those who simply consume content created by the others (Li & Bernoff, 2008)

Although social media in generally and social media marketing in particular are

in the current research agenda of many institutions, the number of studies is still limited The materials are in fact mostly made by marketing practitioners and consultants, and those people who have positioned themselves as social media experts (e.g see Weinberg, 2009; Scott, 2010; Zarrella, D 2010) These are more about proposing marketing strategies for companies rather than understanding the users, and there is little backup evidence on the proposed strategies Furthremore, very little research has been done for culture-specific social media marketing: most research is reported on the US or European markets, and very little is on other areas like Vietnamese users

Goals and Scope

This thesis is aimed at deeper understanding of social media users in general, and

in the Vietnam market in particular Despite lagging behind those leading countries, Vietnam is catching up fast The current Internet penetration rate is estimated to be 35%, which accounts for roughly 30 million users – and is ranked

7th worldwide (Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook, 2010) Almost all young generation users will be expected to go online in the next few years

More specifically, we would like to answer three research questions First, what are the characteristics of Vietnamese users in the comparison with those of users from other countries Second, what are the impacts that the social media users have on company‟s marketing goals? And third, what can companies do to utilize the new media for their marketing/branding strategies?

We therefore aim to achieve three related goals:

 Constructing a questionnaire that can help company to create social media consumer profiles in Vietnam,

 Determining whether social media can be considered as an effective marketing channel, from the user perspectives, and

 Deriving a list of recommendations for marketing management for entering social media

Limitations

In carrying out this study, we indentify that there are constraints that will limit our results:

 The time constraints for the Master thesis, as well as the resources allocated

to obtain answers in questionnaires from both users and companies

 The subject is new, and prior research materials are limited (although there are currently a dozen of books and many websites devoted to the subject – but these are generally non-research with little numerical evidences to back-

up claims)

Chapter 1 Review of social media marketing

In this chapter, we review the literature on social media marketing In particular,

we will briefly describe social media concepts, their implications for marketing, and finally the current state of social media and social media marketing in Vietnam

1.1 Concepts in social media marketing

Social media refers to those “relate to sharing of information, experiences and perspectives throughout community-oriented websites” (Weinberg, 2009, p.1) This community-based sharing idea is indeed an old concept, for example, it can date back to a conferencing system called WELL (Whole Earth eLectronic Linkm 1985), which allowed public conversations as well as private exchanges (Rheingold, 2000) One of the very first social networking websites was SixDegrees (1997) which let people create profiles and connect with friends However, it was not until the early 2000s, social media took off once it reached a critical mass of users

Social media is now accepted as a new media – competing well with traditional media (such as news papers, radio and TV) in number of users and attention Examples of social media include blogs, forums, message boards, user-generated sites, multimedia sharing sites, social network sites, wikis and podcasts

The new media opens a new room for marketing practitioners – the set of

practices known as social media marketing (SMM) According to Garnyte and Perez (2009), SMM is “a process that empowers individuals to promote their websites, products or services through online channels and to communicate with and tap into a much larger community that may not have been available via traditional advertising channels” Further, SMM is “about listening to the community and responding in kind”

In this section, we review the key concepts that give rise to these practices, including: word-of-mouth, user-generated content and Web 2.0, user-centered communication In the next section, each social medium is examined in greater details

1.1.1 Word-of-mouth

Word-of-mouth (WOM) is the process of exchanging message from person to

person The typical information exchanged includes brands, products, services and organizations (e.g see Buttle, 1998) In social media, WOM is highly efficient because a message can be sent instantly and reaches a massive number

of audiences at once

Another remarkable characteristic of WOM is the division into two sets of roles:

opinion leaders and opinion seekers (Gilly et al, 1998; Chu, 2009, p.9)

Generally speaking, opinion leaders are those who provide and transmit information to their peers, and as a result, influence others‟ opinions On the other hand, opinion seekers look for opinionated information from others to make informed decision It should be noted that this does not necessarily mean a person

is always an opinion leader or seeker, although some people have the tendency to influence people‟s opinions or are generally motivated to share information

It has been widely known for decades that WOM influences purchase decision, and can be one of the most powerful sources of information that impacts adoption of innovations and new products (Chu, 2009) A recent research by (Iyengar, 2009) reveals a strong pattern on influence of social network friends on purchasing decision with (positive effect on 40% moderately connected users, and negative effect on 12% highly connected users) It may be due to the fact that recommendations from peers are often perceived as less biased and more trustworthy than commercial messages

1.1.2 User-generated content and Web 2.0

The rise of popularity of community-oriented websites is clearly associated with

the concept of User-Generated Content (UGC) In short, UGC is a phenomenon

in which the content is produced by users themselves rather than the owner of the media Examples include blog posts, comments, shared user-produced images and videos

This phenomenon is a big shift in Web publishing In the 1990s and the early 2000s, Web content was typically professionally edited, and the Web users typically consume information rather creating it The phenomenon was so profound that Time voted for “you” as the “person-of-the-year” in 2006 The Web is more and more user-centric in the sense that the users are the most important asset of the Web – not only because users are the passive audiences but also active content creators and the agents for information propagation The shift has been summarized in the new term: Web 2.0

1.1.3 Social technographic ladders

According to Ivanauskas (2009) active social media users can be categorized into six groups according to their participation level:

 Creators are those who actively create content, e.g publishing a blog or a Website, creating and uploading video and music, and writing articles and posting them

 Critics are those who make judgement about content, e.g rating/reviewing products and services, commenting on others‟ blogs, editing Wiki articles

 Collectors are those who collect information from a variety of sources, e.g using RSS/Atom feeds, voting for Websites online and adding tags to Web pages and multimedia objects (photo, music and video)

 Joiners are those maintain their profiles on a social network site or visit those sites

 Spectators are those who simply consume content available online (e.g reading blogs, listening to podcasts, watching video, reading online forums, rating reviews and ratings from others)

 Inactivesare those who do none of these activities

1.1.4 User-centered marketing communication

Table 1.1: Online community needs Source: Ivanauskas (2009)

Table 1.1 points out the difference between the needs of offline users and those by online users As a result of these new requirements, marketers who used to be in the center of marketing communication are now replaced by consumers

Thus, it is important for the company to pay close attention to such content and the media channels As suggested by Ivanauskas (2009), marketers should make the best effort to engage with the consumers through social media in order influence these messages For example, instead of sending simple messages, marketers should provide the content which would be relevant for consumers and would generate conversations among them In the social technographic ladders,

marketers should be concerned about “Creators” as they are most likely to be the trend setters / brand evangelists (opinion leaders)

However, the change in online user behaviors in response to commercial messages makes it difficult for marketers to target customers, especially when the new consumer takes the initiative for transactions, at the place and time they want They are also turning more frequently to various types of social media to conduct their information searches and to make their purchasing decisions

1.2 Social media types

In this sub-section, we review several well-known social media types, and whenever possible, discuss the implication in marketing The reviewed types are: blogs, forums, social network sites, social news/bookmarking and media sharing

1.2.1 Blogs

Blogs (a short hand for web log) are tool that allows a user or a group of users to post their content (mostly textual) Typically the blog content is ordered in time, may contain some tags (keywords) Other users, depending only privacy settings, can comment on the blog posts, and comment on comments, creating an asynchronous communication mode, which is somehow like email but unlike chatting These comments may take form of critique, praise or useful suggestions

According to Dan Zarrella (2010), there are more than 346 million people who read blogs and more than 184 million people are bloggers themselves and almost 1.4 blogs are created every second in the domain of blogosphere Technorati is the foremost blog search engine or a blog index as it monitors 112.8 million blogs and 250 million tagged items of social media According to the report by Technorati for year 2008, almost 36 % of bloggers come from the age rang of 25-

34 years, 27% are aged 35-44 years, 13% are 18-24 years, and 8% are aged more

than 55 years These demographics reveal the fact that the new generation of consumers is more active in the blogosphere

The responsiveness of blogs is another key benefit for the marketers Blogging provides great opportunities for the companies to converse and influence their stakeholders (internally and externally) Companies can use blogs to promote increased communications between peers and to allow a forum to emerge in which employees can talk back to their bosses, because individuals trust more in blogs written by the executives and employees as opposed to an official corporate blog or website

Even more exciting opportunities for marketing professionals derive from external communications via blogs, as blogs can help the organization to develop and maintain stronger relationships and brand loyalty with its customers, generate consumer insights Li and Bernoff (2008) go even further; they suggest that blogging can increase ROI on the Advertising, PR, Customer Support and Research value It is clearly important to join on-line conversation with the customers, as four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37% posting them frequently (Technorati Blogosphere report, 2008)

1.2.2 Chatting software and microblogging

Chatting software like Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk allows synchronous communication among users One of the most useful features in chatting software

is the display of status of a user (e.g in the form “what I am doing/thinking/feeling”) Depending on the privacy setting, the status can be visible or invisible to a certain group of friends Although a status is not a conversation, its message is clear: being present or absent, and sometimes, the carrying the moods This, in many ways, complements standard blogs where the content is generally well-edited, and is meant to be read at any time

A closely related service is micro-blogging which also allows people to communicate using short messages As of May 2007, there were more than 100

micro-blogging systems in use (Zarrella, 2010, p.33) The most popular site is currently Twitter Launched in 2006, Twitter exploded since mid-2007, and by April 2010, there are over 100 millon accounts1 Acting as a live news feed, Twitter allows users to continuously update their profile with a new line of text Users can follow other Twitter users to see what they are doing or search for topics to see a list of what all Twitter users are tweeting The ability to search in real time has provided a valuable tool for advertisers and researchers when seeking to understand how the public feels about an issue

1.2.3 Forums

Forums are virtual public place where users can jointly discuss about some topics This type of social media sites have a huge influence on consumers purchasing behavior as most of them are developed for exactly this purpose – to help making the right purchasing decision

From the marketer‟s perspective, such sites provide a direct opportunity to influence the consumer‟s purchasing choice Carefully developed social strategy could affect the talks about their brands and services Finding and influencing the opinion leaders on such networks could be a key objective in communication strategy

According to Internet consumption report (Soumokil, 2008) such type of content

is really welcomed by customers as 64 % of internet users desires “user ratings/reviews” and 59 % is looking for “product or price comparison tools” on the net

1.2.4 Social news, social bookmarking and content aggregators

This type of services refers to social consumption of content For example, users often share and discuss the news with friends and collectively determine which news is the best Currently RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a key technology

1

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/internet/Twitter-snags-over-100-million-users-eyes-money-in content sharhttp://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/internet/Twitter-snags-over-100-million-users-eyes-money-ing, allowhttp://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/internet/Twitter-snags-over-100-million-users-eyes-money-ing personalized aggregation of news and other content (Razorfish, 2008) Popular sites include Digg and Reddit

1.2.5 Social network sites

A SNS is a piece of software that typically runs on the Web and allows users to sign up, create personal profiles and invites other signed users to join their circle

of friends Although we have mentioned early that WELL (found in 1985) had many characteristics of a social network platform, the Web-basd SMS became only popular in the early 2000s Frienster is perhaps the earliest SNS that generates a strong interest in 2002 However, it was MySpace that made a real case, where it beame the most popular sococial networking site in the US in June

2006 By 2008, MySpace lost its top position to Facebook2 Facebook has over

500 million active users by June 20103

Google+, a social network operated by Google, Inc., launched on June 28th, 2011 with integrations across a number of Google products, including Buzz and Profiles Google+ is a new social network that promises to make it easier for members to share information to “circles” of friends to whom that update is relevant

Social networking is mostly considered among B2C companies, it could be a valuable tool to create strong bonds with other stakeholders as business partners and employees But those skeptical about social networking„s value to business argue that ―networking can easily turn into ―not-working and damage the relationships between the parts

1.2.6 Media sharing and content communities

Media is generally referred to text, image, audio & music and video content or the mixture of those types As media is shared among users, we typically need

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySpace

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

two things to make it convenient The first is the sharing platform, where it can

be Web-based (e.g using the browsers) or specialized software The second is an indexing method for ease of searching and browsing And the second is currently known as “tagging” Simply put, a tag is a small set of keywords which are informative about the content

Video

According to (Zarrella, 2010), one of the earliest video-sharing sites was IFILM.net (launched 1997) This was an online collection of short video submitted by users However, the service did not reach wide audience because by that time, the connection speed was mainly dial-up and was slow while the videos were big The situation changed significantly with the advent of Flash MX

in 2002 allowing streaming videos at very low rate As a result, YouTube was made possible in 2005 and quickly reached the mass audience YouTube now has

a vast number of user-submitted videos freely available to the public While the site began with user-generated content, it now offers numerous types of videos including commercial videos Recently, YouTube began the slow rollout of YouTube Live, a service that enables users to host a real-time video tream Currently, YouTube has agreed to provide live-streaming capabilities for certain content partners with an eye on expanding it to the public

Photo

Photo-sharing was started in later 1990s with Ofoto, Shutterfly and Webshots In the early 2000s, Photobucket and ImageShack were launched However, these were not very popular until 2004 with the birth of Flickr Flickr (now part of Yahoo!) remains the most popular photo-sharing site today, but its functionalities are not limited to simple sharing but consist of social networking as well Flickr users can upload, edit, organize, and share photos Through the creation of a profile, users can keep in touch with family and friends through their digital

photos In addition, many use this service as a web-hosting database for pictures for their website or personal blog

Music

Besides Web-based sharing of media, peer-to-peer (or P2P) sharing is also popular Typically, this is made through P2P software allowing fast upload and download The most famous example was Napster4, where music lovers could freely share their songs using a P2P client This made a legal battle with the record industry leading to the close of the service in 2001

Document and presentation

Currently the most popular presentation sharing site is SlideShare5, which was launched in 2006 It looks like YouTube since it allows dynamic run of presentation slides For document sharing, there are currently a number of services available, including Scribd, Docstoc and Wepapers Scribd is now perhaps the most popular sharing site By 2008, it was ranked one of the top 20 social media sites6

1.2.7 Integrated and mobile social media

In fact, many sites today support multiple media mentioned about For example, Facebook at the time of this writing allows users not only to make friend but also post short status messages, share links, write notes (pretty much like a traditional blog posts), tags people, posts images, music and videos (much like standard multimedia sharing sites) Second, many sharing sites are now associated with popular social network sites Third, there is an initiative known as OpenID to allow multiple accounts by the same user in many separate sites to be jointly accessed

4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster

5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlideShare

6 http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/31/scribd-had-a-blowout-year-and-so-did-the-web-document/

One of the most interesting developments is the rise of social media in mobile platforms Mobile computing offers functionalities that are not previously available in PC-based platform For example, mobility allows users to stay connected on the move, and the information of location is therefore important In addition, social interaction is not limited any more to the virtual space as in PC-based communication but mix well with traditional face-to-face interaction In the recent years, location-based services are on the rise For example, users of Loopt7 can share their locations to friends and discover who is nearby

1.3 More on social media marketing practices

Businesses are now increasingly embracing social media As reported in a 2010 survey, 79% of the top 100 companies worldwide use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or corporate blogs for communicating with customers and stakeholders (Bursonnine‐Marsteller, 2010)

Garnyte and Perez (2009) argue that social media marketing is different from traditional marketing on the following grounds: (i) SMM facilitates natural discovery of new content, (ii) SMM boosts traffic amd (iii), SMM builds strong relationships The author also suggests that, SMM can be used for achieving one

of more of the following goals: (a) Drawing traffic to the site, (ii) Driving relevant links to the site, (c) Making consumers brand-aware, (d) Driving conversions, (e) Triggering conversations

Some other authors have more sophisticated suggestions Henna (2009), for instance, recommends that the use of social media should depend on the business goal that an organization attempts to meet (see Table 1.2)

Table 1.2: How social media tools will meet business goals, Henna (2009)

7

However, there are also challenges that the social media causes to companies Identity and privacy protection are issues related to social media Users are concerned of trust issues The users are expected to trust other users, often strangers, in social media applications Confidential and private information can end up in wrong hands and to be misused Low entry barrier may affect that the value of the content may also be low and content misleading An important element of the social media is the updated information Users expect the content

to be fresh and updated at all times so the challenge is to invest enough resources

in order to keep the content updated Challenging is also to keep a balance between the user-generated and the marketer-generated content Table 1.3

summarizes the opportunities and challenges of social media

Table 1.3: Opportunities and challenges of social media, Henna (2009)

1.4 Social media and social media marketing in Vietnam

1.4.1 Social media landscape

According to the (Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Yearbook, 2010), Vietnam has experienced a fast growth in Internet penetration, with estimated about 30 million users – which is ranked 7th worldwide The number in 2009 is 100 times larger than that in 2000 The overall penetration rate is 35% but it is 50% among urban population Importantly, 74% of Internet users are in the range 15-34 A majority

of users goes online for entertainment, 76.2% - among them, more than 10 million gamers by 2011

users

users

Listening to music 76 Visiting a social network 39

games

25

Visiting forum 46 Searching for a job 22

pictures

21

Table 1.4: Why the Vietnamese go online? (Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook 2010, citing from Cimigo Netcitizens)

A unique feature of the social media landscape in Vietnam was the close of the once-popular blogging site Yahoo! 360 Degree Like everywhere else, Vietnamese Internet users love to chat But unlike Internet users worldwide and even in South East Asian, most people happen to chat through the Yahoo! InstanMessenger This had a big influence in the adopton of the blogging tool provided by Yahoo! – the Yahoo! 360 Degree However, in 2007, Yahoo! 360 Degree was closed, and it forced Internet users to seek for new tools Although Yahoo! deliberately offers what they called an enhanced version – the Yahoo! 360Plus, but users never adopted it widely After a short period, most users appeared to move to Facebook

Another quite distinctive feature of Vietnamese social media landscape is the popularity of community forums, i.e those promote the connection and discussion among people of the similar interests (e.g students from the same high schools or universities, home towns, and interest groups) Some of the popular forums are Ttvnol, Webtretho, Lamchame, Otofun, Webketoan – to name a few

Yet another feature is the creation of the clones of popular social media services

in the 2008-2009 period Examples include Zing Me, Yume, Youbanbe and Cyworld VN as the social network clones of Facebook, MySpace and Cyworld

Korea and Clip.vn as the clone of YouTube However, the business viability of those clones is unclear, partly because they do not differentiate well from the original versions, partly because the business model is hardly profitable in the near future

By far, the Facebook is still one of the most popular social networks, although the connectivity has been reported to be quite difficult recently The second largest social network size is ZingMe, which is popular among teenagers Recently in the last 6 months we saw an aggressive development of group buying sites such as nhommua (similar to groupon)

The photo-sharing services were mainly associated with photography interest forums, but now (August, 2011) Flickr is clearly the winner For video sharing, YouTube is leading the game, followed by Clip.vn There are several musing sharing sites (e.g., Yeuamnhac.com, Nhacso.com, Zing MP3) but with limited social interaction

To summarize, the social media trend is clearly profound in Vietnam As of June

2011, more than 50% of Internet users frequently partitipate in social network sites (Vietnam social media report, 2011) Forums are still very popular for informatione exhange, especially those for technologies, women and children, music, movies and learning Despite the wide user penetration, it can only be said that the development is largely experimental

1.4.2 Social media marketing

To find out more details about the status of social media marketing by Vietnamese companies, we conducted two rounds of interviews with four companies which are actively using social media in Vietnam One company is state-own and the others are small & medium size firms We focus on the retail market in Vietnam to have deep understanding of how these companies use social media for marketing communication The first round of interviews was organized in October 2010, and the second was in August 2011 The 10 month

horizon allows us to see the change in marketing practices and in the adoption of social media for marketing communication The data collected from four companies shows that Facebook is the most widely used social media channel, followed by forums None of the four companies has formed a clearly social media marketing strategy Rather, they have used social media extensively for advertising purposes despite none has built criteria to evaluate the effectiveness

of each media channel

This result reflects the general fact that social media marketing in Vietnam is in its perception phase, and the majority of brands are the big names (e.g., Unilever, Dell, Coca-cola, Dell, Adibas, HTC, Ford) According to the Vietnam social media report of 2011, there is merely 0.4% of Vietnamese companies having Facebook presense for business and marketing purposes This adoption rate is

tiny compared to 70.3% in the US (Source: MCI - Circle Merchant Confidence

index April 2011)

It is recognized this slow adoption may be due to the mentality of those brands who see little importance of these social media channels in building their strategic communication plan Social media are still considered in many ways similar to other traditional one-way communication channels, while their strength

is really in two-way conversations

This problem is getting worse due to the overall recession which Vietnamese businesses are experiencing According to a recent account of the chairman of the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the number of failed companies within the first half of 2011 is twice as much the number within the same period

of 2010 It is inevitable that marketing budget will be significantly reduced, and

as a result, the embracing of social media marketing is negatively affected

Chapter 2 Methodology for consumer research for social

media users in Vietnam

In this chaper, we describe the methodology used in our consumer research for social media in Vietnam We first review previous studies that are most related to our research, with a study from UK, and a set of studies from Italia, Spain, Paskistan and Uzbekistan We then present our research strategy and data collection process

2.1 Review of existing research

This section reviews two relevant theses on consumer research for social media users We will analyse the following points about each study: (i) its purposes & methods and findings, (ii) what can we apply for similar research in Vietnam?

2.1.1 Thesis of (Ivanauskas, 2009) for the UK market

The questionnare consists of different types of questions Most of them are closed-ended to collect pre-defined answers Some other questions are both closed-ended and open-ended, leaving a possibility for respondents to identify additional concerns In addition, the author also utilizes Likert-scale questions for

assessing some commonly known statements about the social media and gathering the data about consumer‟s attitudes and behaviors The wording of the questionnaire is based by considering the similar consumer surveys in the US market (Cone, 2008)

The data was collected from a sample population of size 100 within three weeks The respondents were Londoners who actively used social media properties and are members of Facebook.com – the second most visited social media platform in the UK

Relevance to our consumer research in Vietnam

Although the research is limited to the UK market, it offers interesting insights and methodology which we can adapt for the Vietnamese market:

 The questionnaire is highly relevant to our purposes of building a user profile and assessing the influence of social metdia on marketing communication strategies by company It is well-organised and meets the stated hypotheses and the needs of marketers

 The analysis of user groups based on technographic ladders is important for marketers to derive appropriate marketing communication strategies for their own market and target customers

However, the research is limited to the UK environment and to Facebook‟s users And thus, we need to make relevant change to study other social media platforms and the Vietnamese market

2.1.2 Thesis of (Khan, 2009) for markets of Italia, Spain, Pakistan and

Uzbekistan

Purpose

Different from the work of (Ivanauskas, 2009), the thesis of (Khan, 2009) concerns more about the process of making decision by social media users In particular, they want to find out the impact of social networks and blogs on buying behavior of consumer, and on influencing their personal and professional lives

Method

The author conducted a survey on consumers from four countries (Italia, Spain, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan) Most of the respondents are students who are heavy users of social networks and blogs Two methods of questioning were used for the data collection: one questionnaire was sent person-to-person in Italia The other questionnaire was electronically circulated through survey software (Surveymonkey) to Pakistan (IQRA University, Islamabad), Spain (ESADE, Barcelona) and Uzbekistan (Nationwide)

Findings

Social networks and blogs have some or the other sort of influence on the buying behavior and consumer purchase decision While some people did not feel that it influences the purchase decision as they use these social networks and blogs just for connecting with friends and did not feel its influence on their buying behavior On the other hand, those who feel that it has some influence on their buying behavior had a lot to share The responses suggest that some people have got addicted to the networking sites and use them more often and as such their

life is completely influenced by these People find it trendy to use these social networks and blogs and being a member of the social media, groups, forums are considered trendy and in vogue thing Some people surf these sites to interact with people with similar preferences and it helps in their decision-making ability They take the views and suggestions of the people before taking any such decisions and feel quite comfortable with it

Relevance to our consumer research in Vietnam

The research suggests important ideas about respondents and how to approach them: we need fragment the users into demographic groups, e.g age, job, location For those users we can approach directly, questions should be more open-ended On the other hand, for those participating online, questions should

be more close-ended but the questions should be explained clearly

However, the research focuses on the influence of social media buying behavior and consumer decision making, which does not resemble our purposes

2.2 Research strategy

Based on previous studies, we realize the need to construct a profile of consumers in the Vietnamese market Based on insights from analysing secondary data, we design a questionnaire to collect primary data from end users

2.2.1 Questionnaire design

We adapt the methods used in the study of (Ivanauskas, 2009) to design a questionnaire for our purposes with some relevant aspects learnt from related surveys in Vietnam such as Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook (2010) and Cimigo Netcitizen (2010)

In particular, we make the following change to the Ivanauskas‟ questionnaire:

 Reducing the number of questions from 19 to 16,

 Changing the content and question orders to make it fit into the Vietnamese market, (e.g., Q 2,3,15 and 16),

 Adding more detailed explanation about social media concepts to aid the users with better understanding,

 Changing in the way to ask and answer for more obtaining accurate results: Q 5 &7

 Questions are translated into Vietnamese

2.2.2 Data collection process

We conduct a survey using both email-based and web-based questionnaires The general appearance of the questionnaire is selected from pre-designed themes for consumer type surveys which are available on a web-based surveying service (sirvina.com)

Sample selection

In order to study how the social media impact to marketing communication strategy of the companies, we obtain 150 consumer responses to evaluate the social media effect on marketing communication The respondents in consumer research should have minimum knowledge of social media that can help them understand the questionnaire clearly Therefore, only the people who have used social media applications are considered as possible respondents Moreover, due

to limited data about the total number of social media users in Vietnam, short time frame and the budget, most of the respondents are the office workers in Hanoi and students from universities like Foreign Trade University We choose

to sample from users of Facebook.com (social network site) and Webtretho.com (forum), mail groups, Yahoo! Messenger and Skype as these services represent the majority of social media consumers in Vietnam This sample frame was used

to define the sample size needed to collect appropriate and valid data for the research

The pilot study

The pilot study was preformed a month before the starting date of the real survey

As Chisnall (1997) suggests, the size of a pilot survey is often about 10% of the main survey

As the chosen sample size was 150 people for the consumer research, in our pilot study, questionnaires were sent to 15 random respondents in our contact list and left for one week in order to get needed responses Seven respondents completed the survey in one week and all of them filled it correctly, and thus it suggested a possible response rate of 46% Most of them commented on the survey about layout and some fieldworks that should explain more details to respondents Based on these comments, the wording was adjusted to some of the questions as some of the terms were unfamiliar to the respondents

The main study

As mentioned earlier, the survey was conducted on the social networking site Facebook.com, the survey service website Sirvina.com and on our social networking like mail groups, Yahoo! Messengers and Skype After completion of the pilot study we decided to run the survey for a two week period, due to the possibility that some of the respondents might not be checking their accounts or messages very often Based on the estimated response rate in the pilot survey (46%), around 350 messages were sent through my social networks with the expectation that we would receive around 150 filled surveys I started with a subject on my emails that “Evaluating social media effect on marketing communication – It is so interesting”, and included a link to the survey site and attached the questionnaire to the emails I also asked friends in my social networks to forward the email to their friends As a result, some people posted links to the survey on their Facebook and other social media sites

During data collection, we faced with some difficulties like many people did not open the mails or click on the survey link Some of them did not know how to click/choose on the right way for some questions It seems that Questions 8, 12 and 15 in our survey are not really familiar to the respondents With those misunderstood, we emailed them to clarify the questions After 10 days, we received 120 filled surveys We followed-up all the answers and sent them a reminder about helping us to complete the survey before deadline Finally, we obtained 164 filled surveys that can be used for analysis

Ensuring Reliability and Validity

In order to ensure reliability during our data collection process, we take notes all the comments from the respondent For validation, the questionnaire was pretested in 15 random respondents This would ensure that aspects of the research topic will be examined Data would be collected from well-chosen and representative samples The persons that we are going to questionnaire are expected to have knowledge about social media and using social media as channels to interact with other people

Chapter 3 Consumer analysis and recommended entry strategy for marketing management into social media

3.1 Consumer analysis

3.1.1 The consumer profile of web 2.0 citizen in Vietnam

Gender and age distribution

Figure 3.1: Gender distribution of respondents

First the gender distribution of respondents is depicted in Figure 3.1 and the age distribution is shown in Figure 3.2 It can be seen that the distribution is uneven – there are far more females than males This is because of many respondents are members of the female-dominant communities such as Webtretho The respondents from the 25-34 age group account for the majority, followed by the 15-24 year olds Note that the data collection may be biased toward the young users, as we believe that they are the main target customer of most companies in fashion, education and bank in Vietnam

In fact, it is still possible to make an assumption that these two groups represent the majority of users of social media applications Readers should be aware that the

reported age figure from the industry is about general Internet users, not the social media users, so it is natural that our numbers are different For example, as cited in the ADMA‟s Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook of 2010, Cimigo Netcitizen reports that there are 38% of Internet users are in the 15-24 age group, which are almost the same as the portion of the 25-34 age groups (36%)

Figure 3.2: Distribution of age groups

Income distribution

According to the survey results the majority people using social media properties are on the middle income or more, as most of their income falls into the 60-240 million VND per year (Figure 3.3) Most common occupation of internet users are officers/executives, professional, factory/retail workers and students

Figure 3.3: Income distribution amount respondents

According to the result, the most popular type of social media property amongst Vietnamese users is “Social networks” with the average rank of 2.16 Not too far behind are “Forums” (2.66) and “Content Aggregators” (3.17) According to the survey results “Micro Blogs” are still in an early adoption stage with the average rank of 5.26 among all respondents and 58% of respondents rank it as the last choice when using Social Media sites Surprisingly, “blogs” are not very popular among Vietnamese users (with the average ranking 4.37) On the other hand

“Content communites” are finding their way to success (3.29)

Figure 3.4: Average rank of social media services in terms of popularity (the higher

rank – the more popular - means the smaller numerical value)

With new social media applications, users have the opportunity not only to retrieve information, but also to contribute their own content In Vietnam, social networking and forums are used frequently 65% of users choose social networks

to be one of the top two choices when they log on social media sites With the forums, the number is 52% However, users take a more passive role on these sites, as only 19% publish a post on sites and 19% leave comments or contribute

to articles Most of them read/watch the things on social media sites (85%) or just maintain an account there (40%)

Usage of blogging has slightly declined since 2007 The biggest decrease can be found for writing blogs with a drop from 27% to 20% (Cimigo Netcitizen report, 2010) The main reason for this might be the closing of Yahoo! 360 Degree in

2009, which had been the most popular blogging application by that time

It appears that Vietnamese people have not been familiar with Twitter This is unlike many other countries such as the US, where Twitter is considered as the best advertising and PR channel for brands Based on our initial investigation

with a small number of Vietnamese users, it might be the case that Twitter appears too simplistic and they do not know how to use it effectively However, this is just a conjecture which is subject to further investigation Second, as the social media adoption in Vietnam is somewhat lagging behind that in the US, the situation may change in the near future

These results complement the Cimigo Netcitizen (2010) findings Cimigo Netcitizen report (2010) stated that blogs and social networks are the main sites used by almost all Internet users in Vietnam Our findings are different, but these are necessarily due to the difference in the subject and objectives of the research

It is worth noting that that these figures are ranking number and percentages, not absolute numbers With growing internet penetration in the Vietnamese population, the absolute number of people using social networks, blogs and twitter might increase

Place and time spent

Figure 3.5: Distribution of places and locations

Figure 3.5 shows where the social media sites are accessed Given the results, it possible to make an assumption that social media has become the main daily

routines as 85% of all respondents are using it “At home” and 73 % using it “At work” 23% of all respondents are using these applications or sites “On the go”, what means that social media gains popularity on different platforms

Figure 3.6: Distribution in usage time per week

Figure 3.6 and Figure 3.7 depict the time usage among all respondents and the young groups, respectively Half of the respondents spend more than 7 hours a week, or at least 1 hour a day on social media sites (Figure 3.6) Among young users, the pattern appears different between the 15-24 age group and the 25-34 age group (Figure 3.7) 18% of the younger group fall in the range of 4-9 hours a week, or equivalently 0.6-1.3 hours a day, while the number is 33% for the older group On the other hand, for the frequent usage segment with more than 10 hours a week, 51% of the younger group are in the range, while the figure is significantly less among the older group (30%)

Figure 3.7: Usage time among young people per week

3.1.2 User patterns in interaction with company

Figure 3.8: Preference of content types

According to the research results (Figure 3.8), consumers expressed that they prefers user-generated content (UGC) (28%) to company-provided content (8%), but most of them wants a mixture of both (48%) About half of the users would

start interacting with the company if they approach the company on a social media site by themselves, and 44% said they would interact if their friends recommended to do so (Figure 3.9) Another reason for the interaction is from reading the news feed on their friend‟s Facebook

Figure 3.9: Reasons for users to start a conversation with company

Furthermore, 54% of all respondents indentify the updating frequency and the relevance of the content (47%) as the main reasons to stay engaged with the company (Figure 3.10) But there are subtle difference between the 15-24 group and the rest (Figure 3.11) The young users in the 15-24 age group tend to value popular content more than relevant content The older groups, on the other hand, select relevancy as the more important criterion