Exploring Social Media Theories: An Interactive Marketing Perspective

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Added on 2024/06/28

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This essay provides an overview of social media theories relevant to interactive marketing. It examines Hofstede's theory of cultural difference, focusing on its six dimensions: power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and indulgence vs. restraint. It further discusses social influence theory, covering conformity, compliance, and obedience, and media richness theory, which explores the capacity of media to convey information based on uncertainty and equivocality. The essay contrasts these theories, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses in practical applications, and concludes by emphasizing the importance of understanding these theories for making informed decisions in interactive marketing.

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INTERACTIVE MARKETING
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Contents
INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................................................. 3
PERSONAL BEHAVIOUR THEORY....................................................................................................4
HOFSTEDE’S THEORY OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE......................................................................4
SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR THEORY......................................................................................................... 5
SOCIAL INFLUENCE THEORY.......................................................................................................5
MASS COMMUNICATION THEORY................................................................................................. 6
MEDIA RICHNESS THEORY......................................................................................................... 6
CONTRAST AND COMPARISON OF THE THEORIES.........................................................................7
CONCLUSION................................................................................................................................. 8
REFERENCES................................................................................................................................... 9
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INTRODUCTION
For a successful professional career, there is a need to have the knowledge of the latest
techniques and practices with the widely used theories and the models so that the high efficiency
can be maintained in the tasks and better outcomes can be attained. Here, one of the most
essential and widely used practices are the social media and its applications and having a sound
knowledge of the theories is recommended. So, with this motive, this particular study aims to
describe three basic and widely used theories of social media in the personal behaviours, social
behaviours and the mass communication.
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PERSONAL BEHAVIOUR THEORY
This theory aim at explaining the behaviour of the human beings at personal levels. Among which
the HOFSTEDE’S THEORY OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE is one of the most used theory in social
media research and hence it is described below.
HOFSTEDE’S THEORY OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCE
The models are based on the six different dimensions of a nation's culture and help to understand
the distinguishing one group from others and hence this is used worldwide in academic and
professional both the workplaces. Its dimensions are:
POWER DISTANCE INDEX (PDI) – it is the degree up to which the low powered members of the
society except and accept the unequal distribution of the power. It is based on the fundamental
issues that the people in the society have different powers (Hofstede Insight, 2018).
INDIVIDUALISM VERSUS COLLECTIVISM (IDV) – it might be defined as the loosely knitted platform
where the individuals are expected to take care of their families and themselves. While in the
case of collectivism where people can rely on others without questing the loyalty.
MASCULINITY VERSUS FEMININITY (MAS) – this is a gender-based power distribution in the
society and can be easily seen around us (Hofstede, 2011). In most of the cases, it has been found
that the women have given low power as compared to the men.
UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE INDEX (UAI) – the level of feeling for the uncertainty and ambiguity in
people is called the uncertainty avoidance index by Hofstede. There are two types of people
according to this dimension, those who believe in principles and those who count on practice.
LONG-TERM ORIENTATION VERSUS SHORT TERM NORMATIVE ORIENTATION (LTO) – there are
both types of people who relies on time bounded activities and those who take a pragmatic
approach (Ji, et al. 2010).
INDULGENCE VERSUS RESTRAINT (IND) – the societies who allows free gratification for natural
living with enjoyment and fun is an indulgence society whereas restraint stands for the societies
who dominates the needs and operates with social norms.
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SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR THEORY
This is based on collective different terms like social influence, capital, attitudes etc. in this the
social influence theory is one of the best and highly used approaches in many businesses and is
described below:
SOCIAL INFLUENCE THEORY
This is the change in the way one person treats others or the behaviour towards others whether
intentionally or unintentionally and hence one influence others. This is based on three areas:
CONFORMITY – behaving to become like others which are driven by different needs and can run
very deep with the beliefs and value of the people (Christakis & Fowler, 2013).
COMPLIANCE – when an individual does something when asked to do by someone, it's their
decision to comply it or not whether they have the thoughts if punishments and social rewards
but in most of the cases it has been found that the people will comply and lead to unplanned
results.
OBEDIENCE – it is quite different from obeying orders of others, instead, they take orders from
who can be accepted as an authority. In case of compliance there is a choice with the people but
not here and hence is mostly used in directive workplaces like military and hospitals (Couldry,
2012).
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MASS COMMUNICATION THEORY
These exert the pressure on the people and their behaviour out of which the richness theory is
illustrated below:
MEDIA RICHNESS THEORY
This theory says that the media has the power to share the required information which is
depending on the information used in uncertainty and equivocality. This theory is also known as
the information richness theory. It describes that different media platforms have different levels
of information which can be judged on the basis of:
CAPACITY TO INVOLVE THE PERSONAL FOCUS – different media have a different focus on the
personal information, for example, sharing information is more efficient face to face rather than
making emails and messages online (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
IMMEDIACY OF THE FEEDBACKS – all types of information shared can be seen completed if there
is a feedback for it by any of the user because of the feedbacks can also be used as the way to
define the effectiveness and correctness of the information. Feedback also helps in ensuring the
proper checks of the transmission.
CONVEYANCE OF THE MULTIPLE CUES – there are several ways that can share the information
from one place to another like audio ways or visual ways etc. Every mode has its own drawbacks
and benefits and hence they are used according to the usage and needs (Power & Phillips-Wren,
2011).
LANGUAGE CARRIED VARIETY – it is a simple and basic thing that the information shared should
be understandable by receivers i.e., should have an understandable or common language so that
the information might not be wasted, and sharing becomes easier.
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CONTRAST AND COMPARISON OF THE THEORIES
All the three aforementioned theories are very different from each other as all are based on
different principles. Talking about the Hofstede’s theory of cultural difference, it is helpful in
describing the different cultures of a nation in general and can be used to determine the currently
followed culture at a place even in business operations. The different dimensions mentioned in
the theory are very effective and all the six dimensions combinedly form the overall cultural
behaviours of any place. Whereas the theory in the social influence relies on the loyalty, trust,
acceptance, obedience and compliance by others on the orders (De Mooij & Hofstede, 2010). It is
the decision of the people involved to follow the orders or not and make a personal choice which
is essential for everyone. At last in terms of media richness theory, it is completely based on the
sharing of information through different notions, modes and platforms.
In terms of shortcomings and effectiveness of these theories, the Hofstede’s cultures define the
complete diversity of any place, but it can be defined that the overall power is divided or
distributed on the dominance or needs. For example, the present situation of Syria needs
masculine decisions and management which can be managed by a man easily but if this is
handled by a woman, then their might have some other consequences which have not tested till
now. At the same time, the social influence theory might fail in the situations of intolerance of the
decisions completely as it may depend on the mood of the people and can be changed at extreme
levels (Lin, 2017). At last, the media-rich theory is very effective in gaining the knowledge about
the sharing of the information on different platforms and ways, but it seems like it is the past as
there are fast changes in the technology sector which have made it easy with several benefits
(Cao, et al. 2012).
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CONCLUSION
The aforementioned study is based on the different theories of the social research in which the
three theories from three sections have been taken and described with a contrast description at
last. The report will help in making better decisions on the basis of the concepts and theories so
that one can attain better results in the future. The results of the report say that using these
theories can be beneficial but if followed properly with knowledge of their consequences.
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REFERENCES
Cao, X., Vogel, D.R., Guo, X., Liu, H. & Gu, J., (2012), January. Understanding the influence of social
media in the workplace: An integration of media synchronicity and social capital theories. In 2012
45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 3938-3947). IEEE.
Christakis, N.A. & Fowler, J.H., (2013). Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social
networks and human behaviour. Statistics in medicine, 32(4), pp.556-577.
Couldry, N., (2012). Media, society, world: Social theory and digital media practice. Polity.
De Mooij, M. & Hofstede, G., (2010). The Hofstede model: Applications to global branding and
advertising strategy and research. International Journal of Advertising, 29(1), pp.85-110.
Hofstede Insight, (2018). The 6 dimensions of national culture, online available at
https://www.hofstede-insights.com/models/national-culture/ last accessed on 26th July 2018.
Hofstede, G., (2011). Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede model in context. Online readings
in psychology and culture, 2(1), p.8.
Ji, Y.G., Hwangbo, H., Yi, J.S., Rau, P.P., Fang, X. & Ling, C., (2010). The influence of cultural
differences on the use of social network services and the formation of social capital. Intl. Journal
of Human–Computer Interaction, 26(11-12), pp.1100-1121.
Kaplan, A.M. & Haenlein, M., (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities
of Social Media. Business horizons, 53(1), pp.59-68.
Lin, N., (2017). Building a network theory of social capital. In Social capital (pp. 3-28). Routledge.
Power, D.J. & Phillips-Wren, G., (2011). Impact of social media and Web 2.0 on decision-making.
Journal of decision systems, 20(3), pp.249-261.
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