Social Media: Many still need to apply communications fundamentals
Last night, I read a great blog post from @sixstringsnc. He called out some interesting data from a recent research report from the MarketingProfs on the "State of social media marketing."
There are a number of interesting, useful and compelling stats, and a few very disheartening numbers as well.
I won't rehash his post, he does a great job here.
But I wanted to call out a few things that might be of interest to our readers:
1) The key thing which didn't seem to be mentioned is one that is obvious, but needs to be said. The data is great, but it is essential that you first take a strategic approach to social media and ask yourself - do these channels and campaigns work for you? Just because 6% of corporate twitters have 2000+ friends, you still need to ask if Facebook is the right channel. I talked about it recently here.
2) That being said, one of the most chilling stats was that only 50% of companies use Twitter to monitor for problems in real time. Since a month after Twitter launched, I have been calling it one of the best tools for "free business intelligence." It doesn't matter if you are an active Twitterer or not, you need to listen. Corporate communications professionals need to monitor all channels. I hope to see this number grow dramatically over the next year.
Why? A few years ago, one of my clients was acquired and some rumors started spreading about them via Twitter. I called my client, confirmed they weren't true and we responded within minutes. Our tweets were re-tweeted, and a potentially very negative story was stopped dead in its tracks before it could hit the blogosphere or mainstream media. If we weren't monitoring in real time, that story could have exploded.
3) Only 22% of companies contacted people that had negative things to say about their company on Twitter. So basically, only 50% of those companies monitoring Twitter use it for any sort of "crisis" communications. The rest just take note of the problems and don't respond. These companies are missing out on a great, low-cost opportunity to build deeper relationships with their customers and address negative issues before they spread.
I love PBS and how they have used Twitter to address customer concerns (Unlike Macy's that just seems oblivious to complaints on Twitter). I blogged about it here, but when I expressed discontent over some programming, I had a response from PBS within hours. And the response changed my mind.
What other elements do you find interesting from the study?
Posted by Mark McClennan on January 19, 2010 at 8:17 AM
