Marketing through Social Media

Marketing has many tools and tactics but with the entering the technological digital era, marketers got a new sophisticated tool, which can gather all the needed information very quickly. This tool is Social Media. While we think that there is nothing special and personal in sharing the information from your life and filling the innocent application like ‘What do you prefer?’ marketers gather very important information from this and apply it further in their work. Dave Eggers in the form of fiction gives us very truthful and right picture of nowadays world. The main focus of his book is social media and its impact on people’s lives. The criticism is on social media, marketing connected to social media and gathering the data for marketing. Pretending not so serious, social media is very powerful tool to collect the information for marketing studies, by exploring the people’s private life, preferences, interests and hobbies. This idea is conducted in Dave Eggers book The Circle, with the life of the girl Mae who is working in fictional conglomerate and people who surround her. The author tries to answer the question of what is happening in nowadays world, and the answer which comes is very simple, it is being created a totalitarian regime, where everyone is submissive and the private life is completely absent. He also shows that media marketing is much more powerful in this world of total submission. The book’s character Mae is working for very powerful social media organization in Customer Experience department. In order to fit in with the work she is asked all the time to enhance her social media presence. She needs to update her social media profile all the time because her social media popularity is measured according to this. Also the necessary part of the work is to answer the market research questions. The following questions concern each aspect of Mae’s life and by filling them she thinks that she makes the world better. To gain the importance and popularity in this fiction organization, Mae has to carry the camera with her all the time, to record everything she experiences. Also she gains a ‘raw conversion score’ — where she earns money just by putting smiles on what she likes in the Internet.

It becomes completely obvious that she is obsessed. But what is sad Mae does not want to listen to people who tell her about that. Her boyfriend criticizes her the most:

“Here’s the thing, and it’s painful to say this to you. But you’re not very interesting anymore. You sit at a desk twelve hours a day and you have nothing to show for it except some numbers that won’t exist or be remembered in a week. You’re leaving no evidence that you lived. There’s no proof” (Eggers 260).

The novel by Dave Eggers is sometimes supposed not to have enough plot and characters depth. Some people even say that it is a fairy-tale or fiction. But most of us will find themselves in the character of Mae who is obsessed with social media and can’t live without it. The book is also very profound about social media marketing. The book critic Ron Charles states that The Circle is the description of the Brave New World, and moreover it is the description of our modern world. He says that now we just live and move and Egger’s novel can be just too fast, too troubling and too smart for us nowadays. He says that people now can’t make a look into the future and realize that the world can be reshaped just by the work of several witty and clever marketers. The thing is that Dave Eggers tries to make us aware of the present reality by creating this slightly over exaggerated fiction.