Social networking and community engagement technology made easy

In our last post, we spoke about how the 2010 Nielsen-Community Engine Social Media Benchmarking Study identified that one of the biggest barriers to investing in a social media strategy besides expertise is that 28 percent of organisations think it’s difficult to measure the ROI. No one wants to jump into something they feel uncomfortable with or have questions about, then have no one to turn to for answers. Not only that, if marketers don’t know how or what to report to senior management, it doesn’t surprise us that 42 percent of large organisations claim there is not enough senior management buy-in to social media.

All the fans in the world as well as unique visitors on your website won’t matter if at the end of the day, you’re not selling more stuff. The prime social media opportunity we see is to increase revenue, decrease costs and improve stakeholder satisfaction (Did you see Olivier Blanchard’s great slideshow?). This is the key opportunity that senior management needs to grasp.

Smart organisations recognise that by investing in establishing their own proprietary social space integrated with the external social networks is the way to go – because in doing so they’re creating a long term strategic business asset, and not simply a short term marketing campaign.

As we know from the research, 71 percent of organizations will be participating in social media marketing in 2010. This is a 31 percent increase from 2009. Being able to put a clear number on social media statistics will help open the door for creating the case.

Where does the budget come from? In 2009, 37 percent of Australian organisations allocated between 5 and 20 percent of the marketing budget to social media marketing. The majority of the budget allocations came from print and direct marketing. Over the course of the next 12 months we expect to see those figures increase because social media is so much more efficient and effective.

Numbers often change the name of the game for senior management. Have you come across any barriers with senior management? What were some of the push backs? How did you handle it? Were things able to be worked out?

posted by Piers Hogarth-Scott in the category ROI Reserach & Statistics Social Media Social networking
Tags: social media benchmarking study