With the emergence of citizen journalism, consumers are more engaged in conversations under types of blogs, articles and shared experience. Consumers are willing to share experiences with others, creating “word of mouth” effect, and as a result, it has influence on brand image. Thus it is suggested that firms should pay attention to these blogs to maintain brand image in the marketplace. On the other hand, companies can post their advertising on these blogs, thereby enable customers to come closer and express their opinion about the brand, including what they expect, as well as what they unsatisfied with the specific brand (Ab Hamid, et al, 2013).
Accordingly, understand the important influence of social media and citizen journalism on marketing communication, Telstra has conducted many marketing activities in order to address their issues properly and develop loyal relationship with customers. The company has developed a customer service team with around 60 staffs for seeking complaints and negative feedbacks from customers about the company via social media channels. With the discovery of 100 million mentions on Twitter, Telstra puts an effort to handle these unsatisfied customers in order to minimize the spread of word. It also launched customer service with a special design on Facebook to keep them involved in the service constantly. The CrowdSupport forum is introduced, in which consumers are able to support other consumers. Since its first tweet in 2009, the company, there are over 35,000 messages sent to over 11,000 followers in response to customers’ questions and requirement (Telstra, 2013).
In conclusion, studying the Customer Initiated Marketing Communication by Duncan (2005) can help organizations to understand the way customers interactively communicate to businesses. The model emphasizes the active role of customers as the initiator rather than the receiver. Moreover, the rise of social media and citizen journalism have given consumers power which reflects the critical practice of the model, as a result, leading to a new marketing communication environment.