Information Technology Reference
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members of the community with endless advertisements and offers of exclu-
sive deals and events. Each luxury brand must take a further step into the
social network and identify the micro-communities and interest groups that
may be relevant for the brand, and understand how they function in order to
design the appropriate marketing approach to adopt for them. Or better still,
the brand should let the people come to them but when this happens there
ought to be real value-adding interaction and enrichment. Luxury brands
must also take advantage of the advanced tracking applications that have
been developed to track social media conversations in real time.
Social networks provide luxury brands with the opportunity to monitor
both the evolution of consumers (qualitative) and the returns on marketing ini-
tiatives (quantitative). In the case of consumer evolution, questions that should
be asked include: How often has the brand been mentioned in online commu-
nities?, Which networks and why these?, What are people saying about the
brand?, Who is saying it?, How influential is their voice?, How many people
do they influence?, Have these conversations had any impact on sales and mar-
ket share? These questions will help brands to clarify the dimensions of other
assessments of the community members including evaluating their attitudes,
behaviors and interests. In terms of quantitative monitoring exercises, these may
include establishing the referral websites that are drawing traffic to the brand's
website, which is relatively easy to do with the right technology. It provides the
opportunity of knowing where the visitors to the website are coming from and
if they are being driven from links provided in online communities and discus-
sions or from other destinations. One of the beauties of the Internet is that it
provides measurability on multiple levels. The most important metrics, how-
ever, have to be identified in order to measure the ROI as accurately as possible.
Monitoring exercises must be used in segmenting, not only through the
usual demographics of age, gender, location and lifestyles, but also by what
people do, feel, perceive and believe. And this may be determined by observ-
ing how people act (behavior), which groups they belong to and forums they
participate in (interest) and how they respond to the multiple conversations
that take place in the social web (attitudes). This approach enables group-
ing people according to what is important to them and what they value, like,
dislike, think, believe, say and ignore. Once a luxury brand reaches the point
of understanding online community members well enough to conduct a con-
structive segmentation process, the brand is well on its way to executing a
social web marketing strategy that is focused on giving luxury clients what
they expect in a meaningful and valuable way.
Social networks are excellent platforms for targeted advertisements if
the core make-up population is understood. Exclusive social networks like
A Small World and ZeroTwoNine provide luxury brands with access to a
wealthy segment of the online consumer population. These websites pro-
vide the right environment for luxury advertisements without the risk of the
brands appearing in the same advert space that was previously occupied by
