Relationship marketing through social networking sities

Social media is a group of internet applications which build on the ideological and technological foundations of web and which also allow the creation and exchange of user generated contents. With the rise of social media, power seems to have shifted from marketing managers to individuals and communities. By relying on the value creation perspective from a knowledge economy viewpoint, the main aim of my paper is to verify if the introduction of social media may be considered as an evaluations or a revaluation of relationship marketing, given that social media have empowered users to connect, share and collaborate by creating spheres of influence that have fundamentally altered the way in which marketers engage in influencing activities. Users are, indeed, no longer passive participants but they play an active role in the media process since they have become an important and productive source of content on the web. By focusing on the customers, social media provide them with more effective and affordable communication tools that enable them to participate in value adding and marking mix decisions by connecting and interacting not only with seller but also with others stakeholders. The interactive nature of social media is likely to lead to the blurring of the role integrity of sellers and customers by expanding the role of customers and including them in the creation of value, thus leading them to become co-creators and co-producers. Identification and description, according to an economic managerial perspective, of the constitutive elements of a theoretical framework which allows us to analyze the relationship between relationship marketing and social media marketing.