Communication in the Digital Era and Online Corporate Communications Strategies Untapped Opportunities for Businesses in Romania
Concerning academia and theoretical research, social media and big data are two of the areas of interest with the fastest growth among marketers.The direction of research, however, is heavily oriented towards the use of various social media instruments or to the specific used tactics, rather than towards their deep understanding and towards the understanding of their place in the strategy of organizations' integrated marketing communications mix. For this reason, the author considered as very interesting and relevant the exploration of online corporate communications strategies and the untapped opportunities for businesses in Romania, as a research direction of the present paper. When considering the use of social media (including big data) by organizations present in Romania, they must not only think about consumers or the marketing objectives strictly related to them, but rather to the overall processes of the company and about all the ways in which social media can help develop the new products, supply chain management or customer relationship management. The companies' access to a large volume of relatively inexpensive data about consumers' choices, preferences and buying behaviour, enables them to develop valuable skills and actually places them in a favoured position to succeed in developing the brand equity and influence consumers' purchasing behaviour through social media.