A recent survey by Awareness provides insights into the challenges and opportunities for social media marketing in businesses.
The survey asked CMOs, marketing managers, and social media managers from corporations about their plans for social media marketing in 2012 and social media marketing challenges they face.
Challenge 1 – Not Enough Resources
Money and people reflect major challenges to social media marketing success to the corporations. Most firms dedicated between 1 and 3 people to their social media marketing efforts. A bigger problem is a lack of money dedicated to social media marketing.
Nearly 60% of firm don’t spend ANYTHING on social media !
And, only 14% spend more than $ 30,000 on their social media marketing efforts. And this reflects spending on firms from less than $ 1 million in revenue to over $ 100 million. This, despite the fact even the smallest firms in the survey likely spend $ 50,000+ on traditional advertising and the largest firm probably send $ 1 million+, according to Entrepreneur.
Of course, I’m not sure I believe this — it may be an artifact of who they got to respond. My mid-sized corporate clients are spending between $ 30,000-$ 45,000 for social media.
Challenge 2 – Assessing ROI
Of course, part of the problem getting enough resources to effectively run your social media marketing campaign is firms don’t feel they can adequately assess the return they get from their investment in social media.
This creates a CHICKEN AND EGG ARGUMENT. Firms won’t invest in social media until they see results, but they won’t get good results until they increase their investment in social media.
A bigger social media marketing challenge is firms do social media marketing wrong because they’ve not invested in using agencies or consultants who KNOW how to do social media marketing RIGHT. Firms afraid to spend the money it takes to do social media marketing right, use their failure to achieve desired results as proof that social media marketing expenditures are not valid.
Firms try to assess ROI, but they’re really not sure how to do it. Sometimes, they borrow tools from traditional advertising, like reach. Hence, they measure increases in fans, followers, etc.
Others assess ROI with measures of engagement, such as mentions.
The social media marketing challenge is that it takes a certain amount of effort (and money) to rise about the increasing level of noise in social platforms. Few firms surveyed spent enough to reach this minimum level.
Challenge 3 – Increasing Social Media Marketing
Most firms surveyed agreed their not dedicating enough resources to their social media marketing efforts. And most hope to fix that in 2012. Here’s what they said:
Challenge 4 – Concentrating on Only the Top 3
Firms concentrate their limited resources primarily on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Certainly, the user numbers make this attractive and spending a small budget across lots of social sites makes little sense. But, firms are missing the most impactful marketing platforms — blogs, YouTube, and mobile.
While respondents aren’t doing much to increase their mobile efforts (which I think is a huge mistake), their number 1 priority in 2012 is blogging. And YouTube will make a bigger splash in 2012, too.
That’s because firms recognize the impact of fresh content on their websites both from an SEO perspective and in terms of creating engagement.
Your Turn
- What are your plans for 2012?
- How many people and how much money will you spend on social media marketing in 2012?
- How much do you think your competitors are spending?
- Can you afford to ignore social media marketing as a cornerstone of your marketing efforts in 2012.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Jan 4th, 2012. 
As you might recall, I taught a social media marketing class during Fall semester at Howard University. The class involved pairs of students working with a start-up client. I used a blog post, which was spread through social media and super colleagues such as Techcocktail, Jess3, Guy Kawasaki, and Scott Monty, and had 75 companies apply for the program by September. Students chose from among these applications and we worked with 26 companies during the semester.
Teaching Social Media Marketing with Startup Clients
During the semester, each team completed a number of tasks for their clients — tasks I recommend to all my own clients:
Create an SEO optimized blog
Blogging still underpins successful social media marketing. In fact, a recent post based on research from Technorati shows the use of blogging is becoming more extensive. The reason is simple — a blog gives your social media marketing strategy a home base. A blog builds online credibility, coordinates communities built on other social networks, and helps others find your brand community online.
We created blogs optimized with the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast de Valk and used other plugins to improve the appearance and functionality of our blogs. Social networks were integrated with the blog and social sharing functionality added.
Each student created 10 posts (for a total of 20 posts per client) over the course of the semester using keywords extensively in their posts. Posts were written to appeal to the target market for the client and designed to build the brand.
Other strategies, such as creating backlinks, were not used because we couldn’t do everything in a single semester.
Use social networks
Social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+ were integrated into the website in several ways. Sometimes the Twitter feed was integrated on the website or visitors encouraged to join the brand’s social network. Posts contained sharing buttons to ease their spread across social networks.
In addition, teams created a presence in various social networks that coordinated with the blog to create a seamless social presence. Team members worked to build the brand community on these social networks and shared links and media of likely interest to the target market using these social networks.
Integrate Email marketing and Adwords
Students added a form to the website for creating and building an email list for future newsletters or other offers. While actually creating the newsletters was not possible, students learned the importance of managing a list. I use email marketing frequently with my clients to optimize their results.
Google generously donated $ 100 for each client to get started with Adwords. Each student created several ads, then spent the money to promote the client.
Listen and Monitor
Finally, students set up a listening post to monitor mentions about the brand. We also used various analytics, such as Google analytics and Facebook insights to monitor how well their efforts were working at creating larger networks and more engagement with visitors.
Overall, I think the project was challenging, but taught students a great deal about successful social media marketing. We did encounter a number of problems, which I’d like to save for a future post.
We’ll conduct the class again in the fall. If you’re interested in applying for a future class, please let me know in the comments and I’ll make sure you get the link to the application when it’s available this summer.
I also welcome comments about the class and suggestions for making it a better learning experience next time.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 25th, 2011.
While thinking about the latest 
developments of social media as the holiday season and year end come upon us, I started thinking about how digital marketers, large or small, can truly measure the impact that social media is having on our organizations.
The only way for us to truly measure social media’s impact is through a coordinated effort of marketing and information technology to integrate social customer relationship management data into existing software. Realistically, we all don’t have time in our days to manually collect all the data points that align with our business goals. And quite honestly, we would all go a little crazy trying to do this!
Therefore, I propose (and I’m sure some of you will agree with me) that marketing and information technology will need to get friendly and hopefully get married someday 
Here is the process I suggest to establishing a working relationship between the two job functions:
- Sit down in a room, so you get to know, like, and trust each other. Start informal conversations.
- Ask questions about their job functions. Really find out what the people in both departments do on a daily basis
- Armed with this newly budded relationship, present what your future plans are, and how it fits into each person’s job function. Find out the possibilities and challenges.
- Come up with a plan and revise until both parties are satisfied with the compromise
- Test, Reiterate, and Test some more. Focus on the little wins in order to reach your goals.
Using this process over a 6 month to 1 year period (depending on the complexity of the project, it might be longer than 1 year), should put you on the track to realizing your measurement ambitions.
Are you having problems measuring social media and general marketing data? If so, how do you propose we can better measure going forward?
photo credit: JMorgan
Social Media Managers: 10 Required Skills
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 4th, 2011.
Is it possible to have too much marketing? It’s a difficult question, especially since WebProNews extensively offers advice for getting the most out of marketing. However, Chris Pearson, the Creator of Thesis and Founder of DIYthemes, told us that the publishing industry was gravitating toward too many marketing messages.
He went on to explain that passion blogging was dying to short “content thin” marketing messages on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.
“I’m not real pleased with that development because I feel like there’s a lack of depth in a lot of areas that still need critical examination,” he said.
According to Pearson, this trend is happening since so many decisions are based on money. Going forward, he believes that marketers need to worry about what people want to read instead of money and produce quality content as a result.
Do you agree with Pearson that the publishing industry is suffering from a case of too much marketing? Let us know.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Dec 3rd, 2011.
If you can’t see this video frame, click here to view.
One of the biggest challenges for any social media change agent is getting a company to understand the power and potential of the channel to a point where they say “yes.”
I recently caught up with one of my favorite marketing intellects, David Rosen of Burson Marsteller in New York and he told me about how he leveraged external news events to nurture client social media activities at an enterprise level. This was so interesting and I decided to flip on the camera so I could share this conversation with the {grow} community.
The conversation with David also gets into getting beyond “yes” and turning social media into a channel that helps companies lower costs, contribute to R&D, and sell more products.
Please contribute your thoughts on this topic in the comment section!
Mark Schaefer is a marketing consultant, author and college educator who blogs at {grow}. You can also follow him on Twitter: @markwschaefer.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Nov 24th, 2011.
