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Social marketing gets much lip service, little deployment

November 22, 2011 | Online Marketing

There's no hotter marketing conversation today than that around social media. The question is, what are marketers actually doing about it? Several recent reports indicate that, despite the hoopla, marketers have a long way to go to capitalize on the socialsphere.

One inescapable conclusion is that marketers that do engage in social media marketing with precision and aggression can gain a competitive advantage over much of the rest of the field.

Consider these facts:

- One-third of companies are aware that their customers are using social media to comment on or complain about them. Fewer than one-fourth, however—about 8% of all companies—are regularly responding, according to an online study of 331 respondents from Internet market researcher MarketTools Inc. conducted in September. Furthermore, although 95% of respondents said satisfied customers are very important or extremely important to their company, only 36% have any formal voice of the customer program in place.

- According to Accenture, only 8% of b2b companies in the U.S. are “extensively” leveraging social media, even though 65% of marketing executives surveyed identified social media as important to their companies' business. The online survey, completed in May with 200 respondents from large ($1 billion-plus) companies, found that only 5% formally integrate social media with their other customer and marketing initiatives, and 26% said they were only slightly engaged or not engaged at all with the medium.

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