Social Nets More than Just Another Mass Medium: Survey
Brands that came early to the social media channel tend to mine it for insights into what their consumers are saying and thinking. Latecomers tend to view social media—including anything from blogs and discussion boards to MySpace pages and video aggregator sites—as one more way to get their marketing message out, according to a new survey.
A poll of representatives from 70 major brands in North America, the U.K. and France revealed that all groups, no matter how new to social media, said they study and learn from the consumer feedback they get through blogs and other two-way dialogues with their markets, the study by the Cymfony social research arm of TNS Media Intelligence found.
Overall, gaining general consumer insights was ranked as the top reason for engaging with social media, with 36.6% of the group putting it first of six possible objectives.
Among the other motives for using social media were building brand awareness (21.1%), increasing customer loyalty (18.3%), enhancing corporate reputation (14.1%) and launching a new product (7%). (“Increasing customers’ purchase intent” got no takers at 0%.)
But the survey also noted a telling difference between longtime social media marketers and relative newcomers in the value they put of listening to consumers talk to each other.
While 90% of the early adopters said they study and learn from direct feedback coming in via blogs and discussion groups, 81% of these “revolutionaries” also find value in monitoring all social media, finding out what the public are saying to each other about the brands and learning from those external conversations, Cymfony found.
By contrast, among “wait and see” respondents who have hung back from social media campaigns or are only in the trial phase, only 40% said getting a look at consumers’ thoughts about their brand is a primary benefit. This late-adopter group puts greater relative value (46%) on social media’s ability to drive a viral marketing message—something the pioneer group ranks below listening to consumers (70% versus 81%.)
“The ‘wait-and-sees’ are thinking that viral marketing campaigns edge out consumer insights in impact,” said Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer for TNS Media Intelligence/ Cymfony in a presentation of the research. “That indicates to me that the sophistication of their thinking about social media is lagging a bit. They seem to be thinking of it as one more channel to push messages through.”
On the other hand, the “revolutionaries” opted to glean consumer insights first and then send a marketing message out into the social channels, according to Nail.
The survey results quote several respondents by name. “A brand is not what a company says about its product,” said Tina Sharkey, chairman of BabyCenter LLC, a parenting-content company owned by Johnson & Johnson, in the report. “It’s what a friend tells a friend.”
The survey also found that the largest response group (39.4%) says they are experimenting with social media and have launched at least one test in the channel. About 18% described themselves as “learners,” checking options but holding back on first deployments, while the same number reported going beyond social experiment to expansion. And 23.9% of respondents said their brands were practicing full integration, including social media in most marketing and PR campaigns.
When asked to name the biggest obstacle at their company to engaging in social media, most respondents (18.3%) pointed to senior management’s poor understanding of or weak commitment to the channel. Another 17% blamed the marketing staff’s lack of social media expertise, and the same number blamed a general lack of best practices or tested models for using social media. Only 9.9% mentioned insufficient budgets as a barrier to using social media to reach and study customers.
Asked whether social media is a passing fad or an important trend, 49.3% of those polled said it deserves to be monitored by a high-level executive and given “significant resources.” Just over 21% pulled back a bit and called for staff-level monitoring, while almost thirty percent went further and agreed that social media was an urgent and “revolutionary new opportunity for business”.
Not one respondent agreed that social media is a passing fad with “limited applications” for marketing, Cymfony found.
Cymfony, acquired by TNS Media Intelligence last year, sells services to help corporations monitor and respond to social media communications. The survey was conducted via phone interviews in late 2007.
