THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA CONVERSATIONS ON BRAND IMAGE OF CLOUD COMPUTING PROVIDERS

The way that companies are doing marketing has changed dramatically over the years, vividly encouraged by the new channels of communications that have been developed, the social communities here included. This paper focuses on the IT industry and aims to analyse the impact of social media conversations on the brand image of cloud computing providers, with special focus on three social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Through using netnography as main method of research, the paper aims to do a comparative analysis both from the point of view of different IT brands and from the point of view of different social communities, leveraging the use of specific hashtags. The research focuses on different aspects, such as number of conversations around a specific hashtag, type of topics, type of promoters, timeframe, geography, as well as the way these link and influence brand perception. The findings aim to help marketers better understand how and to what extent the conversations going on in social media can impact the perception and image of a brand and how they can leverage this to their advantage, with specific focus on the IT industry. As the below study shows, online marketing, especially through social media, can help shape the image of a brand in certain ways according to the different social network used. Due to the extensive reach that these online communities have, with the right tools, messages and influencers, marketers from the IT industry can benefit from a very useful and cost effective branding strategy which can help position their IT solutions in both a reliable and rapid way. On the other side, special care still needs to be taken regarding the messages that are being sent across these platforms, as once being launched it is very difficult to erase them and change the perception already in place. Also, overall, the brand perception of the companies analysed proved to be more or less consistent all over the different social networks, however this is again a very sensitive aspect to which marketers need to pay special consideration.