I have been a subscriber to Ken Rutkowski's “Ken Radio Report” for about four years now and he always sends out to his subscribers fascinating metrics.

In my mail box today I received a report on the impact of social media on corporate spending. Now a lot of people may dislike marketing from corporations and how it tries to manipulate people into spending money, but that, ladies and gentlemen, is capitalism…

Having spent a (relatively) large amount of time over the last couple of years telling clients (those that listened to this advice were fewer than I would have liked) that they needed to talk directly to consumers if they wanted to build their businesses, it is interesting to see that finally corporations are starting to get it…

And the truth is that there are now quite a lot of corporations quietly studying what is going on right in front of them. The tools to do it are easy to use. Some are free and some are delivered with a lot of bells and whistles. (thinking Brandtology who do some fairly nifty analysis of what people are saying in the comments sections of blogs, as I understand).

I have experienced this and blogged about the calls that I have had variously from Telstra and more recently from Tim Pethick, the CEO of Salty Sally (and by the way Tim, I got the replacement samples of chips in the mail earlier this week so thanks).

The point is that savvy executives are watching what is being written about them and reacting when they need to. Having read the survey results that Ken has mentioned, I sense that there may be more watching of the blogosphere than I had previously thought. But the thing I don't get is that there are still so many businesses that I come across who don't do it.

So what does this mean? Are there some companies that just have a lot of blind faith in this area and are prepared to wait for the results, while the ones that aren't actively involved in the conversation are still selling but have not noticed that the reason that their sales are slipping is not because of the economy but because of their own inactivity in the space….?

Ken reports some of the highlights of an e-tailing group study on his website/blog which indicates the following:

The top three concerns of marketers and merchandisers related to social media:

Brand degradation fear – “people can trash my products in front of large audiences”?

Competence fear – “I am using outdated marketing/merchandising techniques”?

Competitive fear – “customer's inclination to leave their site to find a more socially-engaging site”

These
motivators, which drove the last wave of social media adoption, will
also be driving the next wave in the coming year, says the study. Over
the next 12 months, study respondents say they plan to adopt:

The study also found the primary goal for adopting social media was:

Customer engagement (39%)
Mobilizing advocates to drive “word of mouth” (30%)
Increasing brand loyalty (21%)

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Posted in Main Page by Chris Gilbey No Comments Yet