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By the end of this chapter, you should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

Understand the complex and nuanced nature of relationship marketing.

Define the relationship dimensions in human relationships and the variables relationship marketing which develop the customer–company relationship.

Develop a conceptual understanding of how these dimensions and variables build customer–company relationships.

Understand how the key characteristics of social media can be leveraged to build customer–company relationships.

The sources and platforms utilized for environmental communication have been significantly expanded by the emergence of social media. The validity, form, and content of environmental communication processes are particularly radical departures from conventional media, making personal green blogs important of study as areas of everyday culture politics where people make understanding of environmental challenges. There is currently a lack of research on how social media might encourage green behaviours. This research reveals the impact of social media use and green blogging on green purchasing behaviour, which is supported by the social learning theory. Present study shows that social media use and green blogging have a substantial positive connection, drawing on a sample of 580 respondents from Pakistan examined using structural equation modelling. Both notions have a considerable impact on consumers' intentions to make green purchases, and social media trust plays a moderating role in this relationship. Furthermore, social media trust considerably modifies the connections between green blogging and social media use that is related to green behaviour. The current study is novel and offers important information to understand how social media might promote eco-friendly habits and behaviour.

Social media provides researchers with easy access to rich, real-time data that offers insight into both public opinion and the role of social media in public life. However, to date, good practice in analyzing social media has been led by what is technically possible and commercially viable. This chapter seeks to reverse that trend and is the result of a year-long study ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ by Ipsos MORI, Demos, the University of Sussex and CASM Consulting to examine the ethical landscape surrounding aggregated social media research. Based on a review of the legal and market research regulatory landscape in the UK and a program of primary research with experts, members of the public and social media users, this chapter provides a series of constructive and practical recommendations on how to improve ethical standards in this field. Drawing on the context of public ethics, the recommendations provide advice to researchers, regulators, and social media organizations on how they can help to restore trust in social media research and better safeguard social media users.

The chapter presents a senior management view on the role of new and technologically advanced tools, such as social media in internal communications.

We conducted 23 in-depth interviews with senior managers of large- and medium-sized companies in Slovenia.

The results obtained in the research confirmed that the senior management possess a strong awareness of the importance of internal communications in managing their organizations. Moreover, many top managers even pointed out that internal communications play a crucial role, and add value to the business performance through more motivated employees and that social media in the context of internal communications are vivid and growing in importance.

The study provides a starting point for further research in this area. However, the core policy recommendation would mainly be focused on internal communication experts, who must no longer underestimate the urgency of developing communication programs that help employees and senior management start working with social media successfully.

The research presents a new — senior management view on the role of social media in internal communications.

Web 2.0 technologies are resulting in great shifts: “from institutions to networks, from vertical structures to horizontal systems, from hierarchies to heterarchies, from bureaucracies to individuals, from centre to periphery, from bordered territories to virtual cyberspace” (Fraser & Dutta, 2008, p. 2). When we think about how these shifts apply to our experiences advising and mentoring our students in higher education, we do not think it is a stretch to say that when these technologies are employed thoughtfully, these eruptions likely do occur in particular ways that can, in fact, facilitate student support, development, and learning in new ways. Though we use a variety of social media applications to facilitate our practice as mentors and advisors, we acknowledge Daloz's (1999) concern about technology: “More, faster, and farther seem to be the driving values. Thus entangled in the Internet, spun about at hyperspeed, drowning in information, starved by virtual reality, should we wonder that we hunger for real reality? Can such technology nourish our need for community, intimacy, contemplative time, wisdom?” (p. xxv). Daloz sincerely questioned if technology could in fact support “good mentoring.” A mere eleven years later, we two advisors/mentors (one from a large public university in the East; one from a small private university in the West) answer with a resounding “Yes!” In fact, in our experiences, social media technologies can extend the possibilities of good educational mentoring and advising in higher education.

The current study examines the role of social media for designing effective corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategy for modern business organisation to engage their stakeholders.

A structured survey questionnaire is used to collect data from multiple stakeholders through social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. The data is collected from employees, customers and investors of different companies in Pakistan. The data is analysed to examine the perceptions of different stakeholders towards effectiveness of social media for CSR communication.

The results indicate that the majority of respondents think that social media is very important platform to communicate CSR activities. Overall, respondents believe that social media is a trustworthy tool to communicate CSR activities and engage stakeholders. Customers believe that communication of CSR activities through social media influence their buying behaviour positively. We found strong intentions among employees to work for socially responsible corporations who are successful in communicating their CSR initiatives to their employees through social media.

The study collected data from Pakistan only, a larger sample from different countries can provide more interesting results. The study didn’t used sophisticated statistical tests; the future studies can develop a rigorous theoretical model explaining how use of social media as communication strategy can influence the behaviour of diverse stakeholders.

Since social media is becoming an effective communication platform, corporations should pay more focus on using social media. The corporations should encourage stakeholders’ views related to CSR communication on social media and carefully address their suspicions in order to engage them.

There is sparse research in literature that examine the use of social media to engage organisational stakeholders. The current study provides a direction to future researchers to explore this area and explain the use of social media as CSR communication strategy in better way.

This research looks at the significance of friends and relatives as an information source for consumers planning holidays. Recent research has largely ignored friends and relatives as destination information sources and has focused instead on the Internet. Two categories of friends and relatives are identified, friends and relatives who live in a destination and friends and relatives who have visited a destination of interest. An exit survey of 1,203 tourists departing a major international destination in Australia found that while the Internet was an important source of information, friends and relatives were as important, if not more, regardless of country of origin and age. These findings indicate that information from friends and relatives and the Internet are complementary rather than exclusive in the minds of consumers.