Despite well documented examples of brands maintaining Twitter feeds, and using them to respond to customers, customer service is by and large not the biggest motivation behind brands setting up social media profiles.

This is according to social media monitoring service Alterian (via MarketingProfs) which found that fairly standard marketing objectives lay behind branded social media efforts.

“Acquiring new customers”…or rather plain old sales was the number one objective for 30.1%, followed by awareness raising (26.5%), and using it as a communications channel for existing customers (24%).   However customer services as such was the main social media objective for only 1.2% of marketers surveyed.

It’s worth noting that respondents (who were based in the US) were asked to give one answer, so this isn’t the same as saying that said marketers don’t consider customer services via social media to be important.   Still – the fact that many brands still see everything through an advertising prism, and often get it wrong as a result, can be seen in the fact that sales was the most popular answer.

At the same time another US survey has come out, this time via publisher Colloquy and the Direct Marketer Association.   This one found that among marketers who do see social media as a customer services channel, the average social media spend was $88k compared to $53k who were motivated by brand awareness and $50k by those who wanted sales.

Not withstanding the fact that this second survey was done by email and involved respondents filling out 17 questions, you do have to ask…is that it?! $50k (£33k) spend to use social media as a way to get new customers?   Unfortunately that stat confirms that marketers taking the social media sales route are sometimes also the ones who understand the least about the area.

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• Alterian Survey Reveals Brands Undervalue Customer Service Objectives with Social Media (prweb.com)

Here’s a stat from the KellerFay Group in the US about where word of mouth marketing conversations take place.   And it turns out 90% don’t take place on the Internet.  Oh nos! Time to get back to having promo staff doing stunts and giving away freebies on street corners.

The PR Squared blog says that this should serve as a wake-up call that online approaches are only ever an “ADDITIVE, not a REPLACEMENT for their “traditional” approaches.”

Though I know PR Squared certainly doesn’t fall into this camp, for social media sceptics this will be a bit of a “see! see! told you so!” argument.  It reminds me of a former colleague who used to dismiss social media marketing with “it’s all smoke and mirrors” and “you still need a good idea.”

Er…well yes, yes and yes.  Online marketing campaigns should very much work in tandem with other marketing disciplines, see a previous post on the need to combine TV and online for one example. Surely that should be self evident?

Naturally we talk about brands all the time (60x a week according to KellerFay) , and tend to do so in our normal day to day lives when not glued to a computer screens.  Similarly, most “new” news is still broken by what’s considered to be traditional media – check out this stat from Pew Research earlier in the year.

Where online channels do however come into their own is in amplifying and rapidly spreading messages.

For example, Twitter stories can become front page newspaper ones in as little as four hours.   And a separate study by Harris shows that Americans under 35 trust social media recommendations over newspaper ones….and far above celebrity ones.   Finally, people who are most active on Twitter are also the ones who are most likely to post ratings and reviews, comment on news and upload articles to share.

(via Lauren Fernandez)

Image – Kit Cowan

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There’s been a lot of research out about how social media recommendations can increase the chances of people buying products or services.

For instance, the other week Harris in the US found that 50% of under 35s followed the recommendations of social media friends, compared to 17% who acted on celebrity endorsements.   And last year Comscore released a study showing that ‘social search’ (social media activity and paid search together) was 233% more effective than search advertising alone.

However,  a recent study featured in Marketing Magazine in particular is worth noting.   It shows that people accessing an online retailer via social media are 10x more likely to buy something than a visitor that comes to the site cold.

According to Sage Pay, on average 7% of visitors to an online store will make a purchase.   However, if directed to the retailer via social media, the % of visitors who will go to the transaction section goes up to 71%.

Especially when compared with a click-through rate that can be as low as 0.02% for display ads, those figures are fairly compelling.   Yet, in the same Sage Pay survey, only 5% of marketers with responsibility for online marketing said that social media was the most effective communications channel.

This is one of the items that we featured this week at Rabbit on our regular ‘Rabbit Feed’ – more details here

Image – Daniel Weir, Via Flickr

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If you started work in the early/mid 90s like myself, you’ll remember a time when going home meant just that – someone had to physically ring you on your home phone to get you to do something and the chances of you having a laptop with you were fairly slim.

Not anymore, as anyone who owns a smartphone / laptop combination will know.   And data published in emarketer (from a TNS / InterCall study) show that in the US 3/10 workers felt the need to be connected to work 24/7 – in particular men in their 30s.

A prime culprit according to the study is in fact social media and ‘always on technologies’ in smartphones.

An earlier IDC study in the states found that 57% of US workers now use social media for business purposes at least once a week.   Meanwhile 34% actually chose a consumer network such as Facebook or Twitter over a business one, due to familiarity and low cost.   The main thing that they do?  Something familiar to everyone on Twitter, asking questions and acquiring knowledge from a wider peer group.

At the same time there are doubts about how productive this is.  While 52.3% of workers surveyed by the American Society for Training and Development did say they learned more in less time, only 37% actually thought they got more work done.

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The other week the ex CMO of Unilver Simon Clift talked about a lost generation of marketers aged 30-45 who had neither grown up with online media, nor who had children at home using it, but still needed to get to grips with it in the day job.

A lot of that so-called lost generation is probably represented in these charts from socialmediaexaminer.com, which show that while 91% of marketers use social media, 2/3 (65%) have just started using it.

Marketing Charts, where I got these stats from, also refers to another study by Unica, which shows a slightly different picture.   That survey of ‘global marketers’ shows that while 80% are using social media or plan to in the future, only 47% do so now….in other words more than half don’t.    And depressing news for those of us in Europe, while 58% of marketers in North America use social media, here it’s only 34% – so barely a third.

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The million dollar question we (and other agencies like us) are often asked, is ‘how can you evaluate social media’ or more directly – ‘will it impact the bottom line.’

At Rabbit we’re shortly publishing our favourite 20 – free that anyone can use – social media sentiment monitoring tools, but a report published in emarketer is also useful.

According to a US study, more than half of Facebook fans (of a brand) are likely to make a purchase, while 67% of Twitter followers reported the same.

6/10 Facebook fans also said they’d be more likely to recommend the brand to friends, among Twitter users that increased to 8/10.

And the main reason people followed brands on Facebook?   To receive discounts and promotions, so though not the most creative tactic in the book, straight forward Facebook competitions and give-aways can work.

This is one of the items in this week’s Rabbit Feed newsletter – more info here!

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This one is from ExactTarget, which worked with Econsultancy to survey 1000 marketers (both in house and agency) worldwide.

It mirrors other reports over the past few months, for example this one by the IAB, by showing that 28% of marketers will shift their budgets from traditional towards digital in 2010, with 66% increasing their digital marketing spend overall. At the moment, digital accounts for 24% of the total, though last year’s IAB survey said that in the UK at least, online spend had overtaken TV for the first time.

Though 70% of marketers planned to increase social media spend, though they also cited the usual bugbear of evaluation as something that prevented them doing even more.    However, on the other hand, marketers are increasingly waking up to the importance of social media in protecting brand value:

According to Morgan Stewart of ExactTarget, “interestingly, brand reputation is becoming a more significant driver of the migration to digital marketing, particularly when it comes to social media.”   On that note, it’s worth reading Joseph Jaffe’s post on how social media could be used to help Toyota “flip the funnel” following its – now pretty much global – car recall.

Image – thornetpics

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There would be something seriously wrong if this chart from Marketing Sherpa showed something different, but it confirms that so-called social marketing budgets are set to rise across just about every industry sector.

Retail is the most active area with 79% of marketers saying they intended to up spending, while only 1% said they’d cut it.

And how is this money going to be spent?   60% will be on the “human factor” – salaries (finally, more brands set to bring in dedicated social media staffers?), monitoring and so on.    Meanwhile 20% will go to outside agencies and other suppliers.

However also worth noting is the chart below from Marketing Sherpa’s Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report.  It assesses the effectiveness of various activities versus the time and effort it takes.    Blogger relations is seen to have the biggest impact, but just like with offline media relations it’s not an easy hit.

According to Marketing Sherpa:

“The most effective tactic shown in the chart above – blogger relations – is used by far fewer organizations than less effective tactics primarily because of the effort required.  This focus on “fast and easy” versus effectiveness is a problem that is far more prevalent with organizations in the trial phase of social marketing maturity than with more advanced social marketers working from a strategic social marketing plan.”

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More good stuff from Norwegian brand strategist Helge Tenno – this presentation on seven actionable marketing trends, namely:

1- People talk, they don’t want to be interrupted, but they do want their conversations to be ignited and more valuable

2- People don’t share stuff because they notice it, they share stuff because its valuable

3 – Our activities need to give the participant the opportunity to choose how and where to participate (the thing I find brands struggle with the most)

4 – People will gladly spend a minute of their day composing and publishing their own version of the brand story, but they won’t give five seconds of their time to listen to the company tell their version of it

5 – People are more valuable owning and using your product than thinking about buying it.  Limiting marketing to just the “process” of purchasing limits your time with people to an extremely small part of their universe

6 – “People will watch a TV programme once, maybe twice, but they will play chess a hundred or maybe a thousand times” (Kevin Slavin)

7 – Imagination: It’s not the product or category that defines a company’s ability to connect and grow with its audience, it’s its ability to imagine something remarkable inside what to others seems like a lifeless and boring category.

Helge is offering to create a larger presentation of fifty trends that the wider community can use, if enough people feed back to him via comments or tweets – more details on his blog!

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