The accompanying infographic — based on statistics cited in our book “Marketing in the Round” — illustrates the fractured world of communication in corporate America. The corporate-marketing world still operates in silos of public relations, advertising, and interactive and direct marketing. As the newest discipline in the fold, social media accentuate this continuing situation.
Most chief marketing officers acknowledge social media’s importance but attempt isolated social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. Many marketers find social media ineffective and frustrate themselves with unintegrated attempts at making them work. Integrating social into the larger mix of marketing to achieve overarching corporate objectives can yield results.
We have seen many examples of social media’s independent success, the building of groundswells of loyal customers. Consider the niche marketing of Etsy, the restoration of Dell’s brand and the rise of media mogul Arianna Huffington.
While incredibly impressive, companies seek to copycat them. Instead, the marketing round demonstrates how they should integrate social into the larger mix. (read more…)
For many businesses, social media requires going back to marketing basics. Based on Social Media Examiner’s 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, “How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses,” 94% of respondents use social media in their marketing mix. Social media has become a “must have” in every marketer’s toolbox.
Despite this, there’s a disconnect between marketers’ use of social media and their ability to measure it, according to Social Media Examiner’s report. While 83% of respondents say social media remains important for business, 40% of respondents report they’re challenged to connect social media marketing efforts to measurable results. In fact, this has been identified as the top issue on this survey for three years running. With other forms of marketing, it’s critical to be able to track your results in terms of revenue and expenses to yield a return on investment. What’s the problem with social media? (read more…)
This guest post is by Alexandra Carroll, director of research firm Summus, Limited.
For years, companies have chased and measured “stickiness” – the amount of time spent on a website – as the holy grail of brand engagement. But what if stickiness doesn’t matter anymore? What if the amount of time users spend with a brand is shrinking? Does that mean the brand is faltering? Not necessarily.
The rise of smartphones has changed consumers’ interaction with companies in ways that might have traditional Internet marketers worried. Even if a company has a mobile website or, better yet, a mobile application, smartphone-usage patterns are different from those of laptops or desktops. While Nielsen research suggests that smartphone users spend almost an hour each day “actively interacting with the web and apps on their phone,” Summus research helps to further contextualize that data. (read more…)
This coverage of SxSW is brought to you by Buddy Media, power tools for Facebook. Eight of the world’s top 10 brands build their businesses on Facebook with Buddy Media tools. What’s your plan? Download White Paper.
This guest post is by Daley Epstein, a contributing writer for SmartBrief. She is reporting live from South by Southwest in Austin this week.
Focus groups and surveys are great for market research. But what’s even better? Twitter, according to Elizabeth Winkler, a research associate at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Focus groups are time consuming: You only get a sample size, and people are often paid for their time — which can sway answers. Tweets are raw and honest: They happen live on the spot, giving true perceptions from anywhere in the world.
An area where Winkler’s research proved effective is in predicting movie sales, as rises and falls in Twitter chatter directly correlated with ticket sales of 60 tracked movies, including “The Hangover” and “Land of The Lost.” Winkler and her team tracked a 90-day analysis of all tweets that mentioned the movies (excluding promotional tweets), beginning two weeks before their releases. (read more…)
Using Wikipedia as a source for an academic paper will still get most people into hot water, yet a growing number of people are turning to even more dubious sites to verify facts for information about their health.
A survey of nearly 23,000 Americans, released last month by the National Research Corporation, says that 20% use social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, to help make health care decisions, with one in four saying the information found there was “likely” or “very likely” to affect their course of action.
Perhaps more telling was that 32% said they had a “very high” trust in social media — only 7.5% of respondents rated their trust level as “very low.”
These are not the young or poor making these decisions, either. The survey found the average age to be 41, while those with a household income of $75,000 or above were more likely than lesser earners to look to social media sites for health information. (read more…)
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