Description

Revision with unchanged content. Over the last few years, the use of online social networks has increased exponentially, and some of these "virtual communities" are among the most visited sites on the Internet. With this boom in popularity has also come a rise in the need for marketing within these spaces, and very little academic literature exists on how to best utilize this new and budding arena for advertising ventures. Traditional business approaches to marketing are no longer adequate, as online environments have completely radicalized the advertising landscape. This book, therefore, provides a new metric of success for social network marketing, supplemental to the more traditional cost analysis that most marketing developers currently use. Three separate, distinctly different instances of marketing within virtual communities are analyzed rhetorically, derived from Bitzer's concept of the "rhetorical situation," among other ideas. The analysis should help shed some light on this new and exciting advertising environment, and should be especially useful to professionals in Communications and Marketing fields, or anyone else who may be considering utilizing online communities for marketing efforts.