Brand, Identity and Reputation: Exploring, Creating New Realities ...

HOW IS SOCIAL MEDIA, LIKE FACEBOOK, TWITTER ETC., USED TO CREATE A BRAND IDENTITY?
Hasan AKSOY, Selcuk University, Turkey
Mehmet Akif ÇİNİ, Selcuk University, Turkey
Unlike traditional media, social media has person to person connections and it has been highly valued nowadays. This
gives the social media the advantage of a highly personalized level of service. Social Media allow firms to engage in
timely and direct consumer contact at relatively low cost and higher levels of efficiency than can be achieved with more
traditional communication tools. First social networking, Myspace was launched in 2003 and has 114 million visitors by
2007 Tong, Van der Heide, Langwell, & Walter, 2008)Nowadays Facebook is the most well-known social networking
website in the world. Facebook has over 530 million active users and 20 million active users in Turkey (Facebook,
2010) .Social media can help spread information about an event and brands. Social media can help to built better
customer relationship to firms than the traditional media channels. İt can allow loyal customers to talk their needs,
preferences about a company‘s product line. The purpose of paper was to seek the use of social media as a tool for
creating brand identity. We searched also if the companies‘ social media efforts were working? Were social media
tactics beneficial to building a brand identity? Also which media tactics were being used, and which social media
Technologies were implemented. In this paper, the interview method with the managers is used to analyze to social
media‘s effect on brand identity on three different sector which is a university, a business and a non-profit organization
in Turkey:
University: Selcuk University
Business: Selva Food Inc.
Non-profit organization: Homeless Animal‘s Protection Association
1. Introduction
Social media enables to create an interactive platform by means of individual and group sharing, contents, and
discussions which are produced by the user using the mobile or internet based technologies. The sites which have large
number of members such as Facebook, Twitter, Hi5 are considered as the most important media sites. Facebook has
started been to be used as a private network established by the students of Harvard University ( Kietzmann et all, 2011:
1).
The first use of social media was the site called ―open diary‖ which was established by Bruce and Susan Abelson 20
years ago. After this period, MySpace (2003) and Facebook (2004) has helped to form the ―Social Media‖ term (Kaplan
ve Haenlein, 2009: 59) .
According to Keller (2003: 598), the brand personality is the humanity characteristics which are attributed to brand.
Each of the brand is of a personality and characteristics. The common characteristics of successful brands are to have a
strong personality. The experiences the consumer has experienced with the brand and the realized communication
efforts assist the companies in the formation of brand‘s personality (Borça, 2002: 142).
The personality of the brands has five characteristics;
Sincerity
Excitement
Sophistication
Competence
Ruggedness
These characteristics of the brand sometimes take place one by one; sometimes together in the personality of the brand
(Aaker, 1997: 143-146).
1.1. Objective of the Study
The study is consisted of two parts. In the first part; an interview has been carried out by communicating with three
administrators. In the study, the achievement of the use of social media as the brand personality formation of the
universities, non-profit making organizations and profit making organizations is researched. In the second part, the
social media uses, standpoints of the members of the organizations in question in the social media network and how the
organizations perceive the brand personalities have been researched; and the standpoints of the companies and
consumers are compared. ―Homeless Animal‘s Protection Association‖ as the Non-profit-making organization with
almost 5000 members in Facebook, ―Selva Food Inc.‖ as the Profit-making company with 2300 members in Facebook
which is one of the most important pasta producers of Turkey, and the ―Selçuk University, Young Entrepreneurs‖
society as the university with 1000 members in the Facebook have taken place in the study.
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