Social media marketing in vietnama study of consumer profiles

The influence of social media on Vietnamese consumers in marketing communication .... LIST OF FIGURESFigure 3.1: Gender distribution of respondents...27 Figure 3.2: Distribution of age g

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) 7Table 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 outcomesafter company-consume interaction (the numbers are the count of responses) 49

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

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

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

Table 3.6: Summary of Vietnamese technographics 57

Motivations

With the advent of Internet in the last quarter of the 20th century and the publicavailability of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the digital landscape hascompletely changed Access to a massive amount of information is just a clickaway 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 thatwas not previously possible

In the last few years, the change has been more profound – users are no longer apassive consumer of existing Web content, they are actively creating new contentand 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 interactivitybetween users and the content being generated by the users rather than thetraditional publishers According to Zarrella (2010), there are more than 346million people who read blogs and more than 184 million people are bloggersthemselves The move catches the attention of the general public by the constantappearance of new buzzwords For example, the word-of-the-year was “Blog” in

2004, “Podcast” in 2005, “Facebook” in 2007, and “Unfriend” in 2009 (NewOxford 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 tounderstand the users of the new media One of the most profound changes inusers is the shift from being the audience of the media to being the mediathemselves Thus the access to users is made easier, but the users have so muchpower in generating the content, filtering out the messages, defining how themessages 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 ofinformation processed by a typical user for a period of time, the difficulty ofcross-language communication, and the privacy concerns when going online.The nature of new communication methods asks for a new look for the area ofmarketing In particular, we need to characterize the users as well as the waysmessages are generated, transmitted and received For example, the nature ofword-of-mouth communication gives rise to two broad categories of users:opinion leaders and opinion seekers (Gilly et al, 1980) A deeper look at thenature of online usage, five types of users can be recognized: those who createthe content, those who make comment on content, those who simply join thesocial network, those who collect and share the content and those who simplyconsume 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 stilllimited The materials are in fact mostly made by marketing practitioners andconsultants, and those people who have positioned themselves as social mediaexperts (e.g see Weinberg, 2009; Scott, 2010; Zarrella, D 2010) These are moreabout proposing marketing strategies for companies rather than understanding theusers, 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 onother 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 leadingcountries, Vietnam is catching up fast The current Internet penetration rate isestimated to be 35%, which accounts for roughly 30 million users – and is ranked

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

More specifically, we would like to answer three research questions First, whatare the characteristics of Vietnamese users in the comparison with those of usersfrom other countries Second, what are the impacts that the social media usershave on company‟s marketing goals? And third, what can companies do to utilizethe 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 thereare currently a dozen of books and many websites devoted to the subject – but these aregenerally non-research with little numerical evidences to back-up claims)

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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 inVietnam

1.1 Concepts in social media marketing

Social media refers to those “relate to sharing of information, experiences andperspectives throughout community-oriented websites” (Weinberg, 2009, p.1).This community-based sharing idea is indeed an old concept, for example, it candate back to a conferencing system called WELL (Whole Earth eLectronicLinkm 1985), which allowed public conversations as well as private exchanges(Rheingold, 2000) One of the very first social networking websites wasSixDegrees (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 acritical mass of users

Social media is now accepted as a new media – competing well with traditionalmedia (such as news papers, radio and TV) in number of users and attention.Examples of social media include blogs, forums, message boards, user-generatedsites, 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 andPerez (2009), SMM is “a process that empowers individuals to promote theirwebsites, products or services through online channels and to communicate with andtap into a much larger community that may not have been available via traditionaladvertising channels” Further, SMM is “about listening to the community andresponding 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-centeredcommunication In the next section, each social medium is examined in greaterdetails.

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, servicesand organizations (e.g see Buttle, 1998) In social media, WOM is highlyefficient 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 theirpeers, and as a result, influence others‟ opinions On the other hand, opinionseekers look for opinionated information from others to make informed decision

It should be noted that this does not necessarily mean a person is always anopinion leader or seeker, although some people have the tendency to influencepeople‟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 onpurchasing decision with (positive effect on 40% moderately connected users,and negative effect on 12% highly connected users) It may be due to the fact thatrecommendations from peers are often perceived as less biased and moretrustworthy 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 themedia Examples include blog posts, comments, shared user-produced imagesand videos

This phenomenon is a big shift in Web publishing In the 1990s and the early2000s, Web content was typically professionally edited, and the Web userstypically consume information rather creating it The phenomenon was soprofound that Time voted for “you” as the “person-of-the-year” in 2006 TheWeb is more and more user-centric in the sense that the users are the mostimportant asset of the Web – not only because users are the passive audiences butalso active content creators and the agents for information propagation The shifthas 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 intosix 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 andmultimedia 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, ratingreviews and ratings from others)

 Inactives are 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 byonline users As a result of these new requirements, marketers who used to be in thecenter of marketing communication are now replaced by consumers

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

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

However, the change in online user behaviors in response to commercialmessages makes it difficult for marketers to target customers, especially when thenew consumer takes the initiative for transactions, at the place and time theywant They are also turning more frequently to various types of social media toconduct 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, andwhenever 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 topost 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 anasynchronous communication mode, which is somehow like email but unlikechatting These comments may take form of critique, praise or useful suggestions.According to Dan Zarrella (2010), there are more than 346 million people whoread blogs and more than 184 million people are bloggers themselves and almost1.4 blogs are created every second in the domain of blogosphere Technorati isthe foremost blog search engine or a blog index as it monitors 112.8 millionblogs and 250 million tagged items of social media According to the report byTechnorati 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 ofconsumers is more active in the blogosphere.

The responsiveness of blogs is another key benefit for the marketers Bloggingprovides great opportunities for the companies to converse and influence theirstakeholders (internally and externally) Companies can use blogs to promoteincreased communications between peers and to allow a forum to emerge inwhich employees can talk back to their bosses, because individuals trust more inblogs written by the executives and employees as opposed to an official corporateblog or website

Even more exciting opportunities for marketing professionals derive fromexternal communications via blogs, as blogs can help the organization to developand maintain stronger relationships and brand loyalty with its customers, generateconsumer insights Li and Bernoff (2008) go even further; they suggest thatblogging can increase ROI on the Advertising, PR, Customer Support andResearch value It is clearly important to join on-line conversation with thecustomers, 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 synchronouscommunication 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 amdoing/thinking/feeling”) Depending on the privacy setting, the status can bevisible or invisible to a certain group of friends Although a status is not aconversation, its message is clear: being present or absent, and sometimes, thecarrying the moods This, in many ways, complements standard blogs where thecontent is generally well-edited, and is meant to be read at any time

A closely related service is micro-blogging which also allows people tocommunicate 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 iscurrently Twitter Launched in 2006, Twitter exploded since mid-2007, and byApril 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 fortopics to see a list of what all Twitter users are tweeting The ability to search inreal time has provided a valuable tool for advertisers and researchers whenseeking to understand how the public feels about an issue.

1.2.3 Forums

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

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

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

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

1.2.4 Social news, social bookmarking and content aggregators

This type of services refers to social consumption of content For example, usersoften share and discuss the news with friends and collectively determine whichnews 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 tosign 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) hadmany characteristics of a social network platform, the Web-basd SMS becameonly popular in the early 2000s Frienster is perhaps the earliest SNS thatgenerates a strong interest in 2002 However, it was MySpace that made a realcase, 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, 2011with integrations across a number of Google products, including Buzz andProfiles Google+ is a new social network that promises to make it easier formembers to share information to “circles” of friends to whom that update isrelevant

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

1.2.6 Media sharing and content communities

Media is generally referred to text, image, audio & music and video content orthe 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 anindexing method for ease of searching and browsing And the second is currentlyknown as “tagging” Simply put, a tag is a small set of keywords which areinformative about the content

Video

According to (Zarrella, 2010), one of the earliest video-sharing sites wasIFILM.net (launched 1997) This was an online collection of short videosubmitted by users However, the service did not reach wide audience because bythat time, the connection speed was mainly dial-up and was slow while the videoswere 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 madepossible in 2005 and quickly reached the mass audience YouTube now has a vastnumber of user-submitted videos freely available to the public While the sitebegan with user-generated content, it now offers numerous types of videosincluding commercial videos Recently, YouTube began the slow rollout ofYouTube Live, a service that enables users to host a real-time video tream Currently, YouTube has agreed to provide live-streaming capabilities for certaincontent partners with an eye on expanding it to the public

Photo

Photo-sharing was started in later 1990s with Ofoto, Shutterfly and Webshots Inthe early 2000s, Photobucket and ImageShack were launched However, thesewere not very popular until 2004 with the birth of Flickr Flickr (now part ofYahoo!) remains the most popular photo-sharing site today, but its functionalitiesare not limited to simple sharing but consist of social networking as well Flickrusers can upload, edit, organize, and share photos Through the creation of aprofile, 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 picturesfor their website or personal blog.

Music

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

Document and presentation

Currently the most popular presentation sharing site is SlideShare5, which waslaunched in 2006 It looks like YouTube since it allows dynamic run ofpresentation slides For document sharing, there are currently a number ofservices available, including Scribd, Docstoc and Wepapers Scribd is nowperhaps the most popular sharing site By 2008, it was ranked one of the top 20social 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 alsopost short status messages, share links, write notes (pretty much like a traditionalblog posts), tags people, posts images, music and videos (much like standardmultimedia sharing sites) Second, many sharing sites are now associated withpopular social network sites Third, there is an initiative known as OpenID toallow multiple accounts by the same user in many separate sites to be jointlyaccessed

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 mobileplatforms Mobile computing offers functionalities that are not previouslyavailable in PC-based platform For example, mobility allows users to stayconnected on the move, and the information of location is therefore important Inaddition, 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 Inthe recent years, location-based services are on the rise For example, users ofLoopt7 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 2010survey, 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 fromtraditional marketing on the following grounds: (i) SMM facilitates naturaldiscovery of new content, (ii) SMM boosts traffic amd (iii), SMM builds strongrelationships 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) Drivingrelevant links to the site, (c) Making consumers brand-aware, (d) Drivingconversions, (e) Triggering conversations

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

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

7 http://loopt.com

However, there are also challenges that the social media causes to companies.Identity and privacy protection are issues related to social media Users areconcerned of trust issues The users are expected to trust other users, oftenstrangers, in social media applications Confidential and private information canend up in wrong hands and to be misused Low entry barrier may affect that thevalue of the content may also be low and content misleading An importantelement 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 balancebetween the user-generated and the marketer-generated content Table 1.3summarizes 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 hasexperienced a fast growth in Internet penetration, with estimated about 30 millionusers – which is ranked 7th worldwide The number in 2009 is 100 times largerthan that in 2000 The overall penetration rate is 35% but it is 50% among urbanpopulation 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 10million gamers by 2011

games

Visiting forum 46 Searching for a job 22

pictures

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 theonce-popular blogging site Yahoo! 360 Degree Like everywhere else,Vietnamese Internet users love to chat But unlike Internet users worldwide andeven in South East Asian, most people happen to chat through the Yahoo!InstanMessenger This had a big influence in the adopton of the blogging toolprovided by Yahoo! – the Yahoo! 360 Degree However, in 2007, Yahoo! 360Degree was closed, and it forced Internet users to seek for new tools AlthoughYahoo! deliberately offers what they called an enhanced version – the Yahoo!360Plus, but users never adopted it widely After a short period, most usersappeared to move to Facebook

Another quite distinctive feature of Vietnamese social media landscape is thepopularity of community forums, i.e those promote the connection anddiscussion among people of the similar interests (e.g students from the same highschools or universities, home towns, and interest groups) Some of the popularforums 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 andCyworld VN as the social network clones of Facebook, MySpace and Cyworld

17

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

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

The photo-sharing services were mainly associated with photography interestforums, but now (August, 2011) Flickr is clearly the winner For video sharing,YouTube is leading the game, followed by Clip.vn There are several musingsharing sites (e.g., Yeuamnhac.com, Nhacso.com, Zing MP3) but with limitedsocial 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 networksites (Vietnam social media report, 2011) Forums are still very popular forinformatione exhange, especially those for technologies, women and children,music, movies and learning Despite the wide user penetration, it can only be saidthat the development is largely experimental

1.4.2 Social media marketing

To find out more details about the status of social media marketing byVietnamese companies, we conducted two rounds of interviews with fourcompanies which are actively using social media in Vietnam One company isstate-own and the others are small & medium size firms We focus on the retailmarket in Vietnam to have deep understanding of how these companies use socialmedia 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 ofsocial media for marketing communication The data collected from fourcompanies shows that Facebook is the most widely used social media channel,followed by forums None of the four companies has formed a clearly socialmedia marketing strategy Rather, they have used social media extensively foradvertising 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 inits 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 socialmedia report of 2011, there is merely 0.4% of Vietnamese companies havingFacebook 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 brandswho see little importance of these social media channels in building theirstrategic communication plan Social media are still considered in many wayssimilar 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 Vietnamesebusinesses are experiencing According to a recent account of the chairman of theVietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the number of failed companieswithin 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 forsocial media in Vietnam We first review previous studies that are most related toour research, with a study from UK, and a set of studies from Italia, Spain,Paskistan and Uzbekistan We then present our research strategy and datacollection process

2.1 Review of existing research

This section reviews two relevant theses on consumer research for social mediausers 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 areclosed-ended to collect pre-defined answers Some other questions are bothclosed-ended and open-ended, leaving a possibility for respondents to identifyadditional concerns In addition, the author also utilizes Likert-scale questions for

assessing some commonly known statements about the social media andgathering the data about consumer‟s attitudes and behaviors The wording of thequestionnaire is based by considering the similar consumer surveys in the USmarket (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 andare members of Facebook.com – the second most visited social media platform inthe UK

Relevance to our consumer research in Vietnam

Although the research is limited to the UK market, it offers interesting insightsand 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 communicationstrategies 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 ownmarket and target customers

However, the research is limited to the UK environment and to Facebook‟susers And thus, we need to make relevant change to study other social mediaplatforms 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 Inparticular, they want to find out the impact of social networks and blogs onbuying behavior of consumer, and on influencing their personal and professionallives

Method

The author conducted a survey on consumers from four countries (Italia, Spain,Pakistan, and Uzbekistan) Most of the respondents are students who are heavyusers of social networks and blogs Two methods of questioning were used forthe data collection: one questionnaire was sent person-to-person in Italia Theother 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 buyingbehavior and consumer purchase decision While some people did not feel that itinfluences the purchase decision as they use these social networks and blogs justfor connecting with friends and did not feel its influence on their buyingbehavior On the other hand, those who feel that it has some influence on theirbuying behavior had a lot to share The responses suggest that some people havegot 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 socialnetworks and blogs and being a member of the social media, groups, forums areconsidered trendy and in vogue thing Some people surf these sites to interactwith people with similar preferences and it helps in their decision-making ability.They take the views and suggestions of the people before taking any suchdecisions and feel quite comfortable with it.

Relevance to our consumer research in Vietnam

The research suggests important ideas about respondents and how to approachthem: we need fragment the users into demographic groups, e.g age, job,location For those users we can approach directly, questions should be moreopen-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 behaviorand 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 ofconsumers in the Vietnamese market Based on insights from analysingsecondary 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 aquestionnaire for our purposes with some relevant aspects learnt from relatedsurveys in Vietnam such as Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook (2010) and CimigoNetcitizen (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 Thegeneral appearance of the questionnaire is selected from pre-designed themes forconsumer 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 communicationstrategy of the companies, we obtain 150 consumer responses to evaluate thesocial media effect on marketing communication The respondents in consumerresearch should have minimum knowledge of social media that can help themunderstand the questionnaire clearly Therefore, only the people who have usedsocial media applications are considered as possible respondents Moreover, due

to limited data about the total number of social media users in Vietnam, shorttime frame and the budget, most of the respondents are the office workers inHanoi 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 representthe 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 theresearch

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 themain survey

As the chosen sample size was 150 people for the consumer research, in our pilotstudy, questionnaires were sent to 15 random respondents in our contact list andleft for one week in order to get needed responses Seven respondents completedthe survey in one week and all of them filled it correctly, and thus it suggested apossible response rate of 46% Most of them commented on the survey aboutlayout and some fieldworks that should explain more details to respondents.Based on these comments, the wording was adjusted to some of the questions assome of the terms were unfamiliar to the respondents

The main study

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

During data collection, we faced with some difficulties like many people did notopen the mails or click on the survey link Some of them did not know how toclick/choose on the right way for some questions It seems that Questions 8, 12and 15 in our survey are not really familiar to the respondents With thosemisunderstood, we emailed them to clarify the questions After 10 days, wereceived 120 filled surveys We followed-up all the answers and sent them areminder about helping us to complete the survey before deadline Finally, weobtained 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 allthe comments from the respondent For validation, the questionnaire waspretested in 15 random respondents This would ensure that aspects of theresearch topic will be examined Data would be collected from well-chosen andrepresentative samples The persons that we are going to questionnaire areexpected to have knowledge about social media and using social media aschannels 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 agedistribution 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 aremembers of the female-dominant communities such as Webtretho The respondentsfrom 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 believethat they are the main target customer of most companies in fashion, education andbank in Vietnam

In fact, it is still possible to make an assumption that these two groups represent themajority 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 socialmedia users, so it is natural that our numbers are different For example, as cited inthe ADMA‟s Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook of 2010, Cimigo Netcitizen reportsthat there are 38% of Internet users are in the 15-24 age group, which are almost thesame 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 propertiesare on the middle income or more, as most of their income falls into the 60-240million VND per year (Figure 3.3) Most common occupation of internet usersare 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 amongstVietnamese users is “Social networks” with the average rank of 2.16 Not too farbehind are “Forums” (2.66) and “Content Aggregators” (3.17) According to thesurvey results “Micro Blogs” are still in an early adoption stage with the averagerank of 5.26 among all respondents and 58% of respondents rank it as the lastchoice when using Social Media sites Surprisingly, “blogs” are not very popularamong 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 toretrieve information, but also to contribute their own content In Vietnam, socialnetworking 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 theforums, the number is 52% However, users take a more passive role on thesesites, 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 justmaintain an account there (40%)

Usage of blogging has slightly declined since 2007 The biggest decrease can befound 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 isunlike many other countries such as the US, where Twitter is considered as thebest advertising and PR channel for brands Based on our initial investigation

with a small number of Vietnamese users, it might be the case that Twitterappears 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 thesocial media adoption in Vietnam is somewhat lagging behind that in the US, thesituation may change in the near future.

These results complement the Cimigo Netcitizen (2010) findings CimigoNetcitizen report (2010) stated that blogs and social networks are the main sitesused by almost all Internet users in Vietnam Our findings are different, but theseare 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, notabsolute numbers With growing internet penetration in the Vietnamesepopulation, the absolute number of people using social networks, blogs andtwitter 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, itpossible 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 “Atwork” 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 theyoung groups, respectively Half of the respondents spend more than 7 hours aweek, or at least 1 hour a day on social media sites (Figure 3.6) Among youngusers, the pattern appears different between the 15-24 age group and the 25-34age group (Figure 3.7) 18% of the younger group fall in the range of 4-9 hours aweek, or equivalently 0.6-1.3 hours a day, while the number is 33% for the oldergroup On the other hand, for the frequent usage segment with more than 10hours a week, 51% of the younger group are in the range, while the figure issignificantly 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 theyprefers 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 socialmedia site by themselves, and 44% said they would interact if their friendsrecommended to do so (Figure 3.9) Another reason for the interaction is fromreading 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 therelevance of the content (47%) as the main reasons to stay engaged with thecompany (Figure 3.10) But there are subtle difference between the 15-24 groupand the rest (Figure 3.11) The young users in the 15-24 age group tend to valuepopular content more than relevant content The older groups, on the other hand,select relevancy as the more important criterion