By Linda Forrest
Thanks to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for inspiring the title of this post; much to the chagrin of my colleagues, I was quite excited about the wedding, hence the title. In all seriousness, when this last week’s many news events – the royal wedding, Osama bin Laden’s demise, and the Canadian election – were taking place, social media took centre stage, eclipsing traditional media as the place that consumers turn towards for news as it happens. As Brian Solis said earlier this week, news no longer breaks, it Tweets.
As Twitter continues to make inroads into the mainstream, especially as a channel for breaking news, I thought it pertinent to check on the status of Twitter and the rest of the popular social media tools in the business world.
Based on my findings, I can say with confidence, the honeymoon is definitely over.
Oh, don’t worry; the business world is still very much in love with social media but now, to draw a timely parallel, that the hullabaloo of the wedding is over, pragmatism and reality are coming to the fore and a committed long term relationship being navigated. Businesses are no longer expecting their social media to slice and dice and chop and peel, but rather setting realistic goals and measuring results. Hallelujah!
CNET reported on an IBM survey about the State of Marketing 2011, presented at a conference earlier this week. One of the findings says it all:
More than half of marketers use social media, but based on responses, their enthusiasm is tempered, suggesting that the peak of inflated expectations has passed; marketers are focused on finding the value that social channels can yield with more targeted insights and actions.
This is something we’ve addressed before: when a communications channel is shiny and new, expectations for that channel are wildly out of whack with the actual capabilities of said channel. It’s a challenging time for marketers when these channels begin to gain interest because it takes time to evaluate how best to utilize them to get results and when the market starts out thinking if I build it (it being a website, many moons ago, a Twitter profile, a Facebook page, a LinkedIn profile), they will come. Again, the folly of that attitude is a topic well explored on this and other blogs.
This IBM survey is by no means the only one to recognize the shift.
This emarketer piece asks the benchmarking question: how well is social media fitting in with the marketing mix? The piece explores the results of the CMO Survey, released by Duke University and the American Marketing Association in February. While social media budgets climb, in both the B2C and B2B spheres, negotiating the right marketing mix and realistic goals, as well as putting in place metrics to measure results, are the order of the day.
This chart shows the meteoric rise in social media spending over the last several years:
Measurement of marketing activity effectiveness continues to be a struggle, as the State of Marketing report highlights:
Nearly 60 percent of respondents listed “measurement, analysis and learning” as their top IT bottleneck, whereas last year, they overwhelmingly viewed “IT support of marketing needs” at the top.
It’s clear that marketers are coming back down to earth where social media is concerned, but that they’re facing challenges in measuring and analyzing how these tools deliver results within the context of an overall integrated program. Measuring marketing activity effectiveness has always been a challenge for some, and will continue to be so for those that ascribe to the wretched theory that “half of my marketing works; I just don’t know which half.”
Image: Bristol Builders
