In the past, for a long period of time, "what does media do to people?” limited communication research, until the 1940s, communication scholars such as Stanton and Berelson begin to pay attention on “what do people do with media.” Then led to an audience-centered theory named Uses and Gratifications Theory (UGT).
According to UGT, social and psychological origins of needs, which generate expectations of the mass media or other sources, which lead to differential patterns of media exposure, then resulting in need gratifications and other (often unconcerned) consequences. (Blumer, J.G. & Katz E. 1974) In other word, “the audience has power over their media consumption and assumes an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives”( Katz, E. & Blumler, J.G. & MichaelG. ).
According to UGT, social and psychological origins of needs, which generate expectations of the mass media or other sources, which lead to differential patterns of media exposure, then resulting in need gratifications and other (often unconcerned) consequences. (Blumer, J.G. & Katz E. 1974) In other word, “the audience has power over their media consumption and assumes an active role in interpreting and integrating media into their own lives”( Katz, E. & Blumler, J.G. & MichaelG. ).
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| Uses and gratifications |
Social media is an excellent example of
UGT. Users have motivations of (1) Social and affection; (2) Need to vent
negative feelings; (3) Recognition; (4) Entertainment; and (5) Cognitive needs. (Social media usage, wikipedia) The users (audiences) of social media could choose to focus on the characters,
home pages, and contents by their own like. It is also a fantastic tool of marketing and PR practice, since companies could determine their target
audiences easily.
The digital age helps companies get
feedback from the customer immediately by use different forms of social media.
It also helps the companies to adjust their products and services to meet
the customer’s requirement. However, according to my observation, some companies
always forget to give the audience feedback on social media; most of time, they
just launch information of their products or services, then they never care
about the commons below those information. Jeep as an example (which I choose
for my final project client), I took the picture below from Jeep’s official
blog:
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| Customer Common for Jeep |
From this picture we could see there is a
customer complaint, which was launched by Jan. 20. However, until today, there
is no official reply for this complaint. I think this kind of complaint will directly
influence the brand reputation in a wide range of audience.
On the other hand, Samsung did a better
work in this field. In china, there is a popular website named Baidu knows. This website aims to help
people solve problems, and provide a platform for user to exchange their life
experience. It works like Google Answer,
users could ask question on it and wait other people to answer it. I take the
picture blow from Baidu knows. In
this picture, a customer asked a question about his Samsung mobile can’t start
up. Then we can see, there is a user named Samsung
digital service platform provide 4 kinds of solution to this problem, and
it also provide a link at the end for more details related to this problems.
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| Samsung digital service platform |
In this case, Samsung digital service platform is an official account build by
Samsung Company to provide professional technical support to its customers.
Data from Baidu knows shows this
account has been answered 276,565 questions. And in the last 7 days, it average
spends 4 hours on answer questions per day. The answer satisfaction rate
reached 77%. In my point of view, Samsung deal with a lot of customer
complaints by a cheap and fast way, and avoid a lot of disputes. Also it protects
the company's reputation in the obvious way.
Actually to reply customer’s complaints on
social media doesn’t take lots of time and money. Company could use categories
and key words to found related content easily. Because of social media has a
strong interactivity, the company should understand the power of word-of-mouth
marketing, and pay more attention on the customer's comments and problems;
gives the answer in time and help the customers to obtain gratifications.
July Yu
