Social Media Shine Off The Apple For Marketers?

Don’t get too worked up over that headline. Social Media is still going strong, and will continue to be important as a marketing and cultural force when your grandchildren are zipping around in their flying cars.

That said, the good news in this recently published IBM/Unica survey is that marketers are coming back to earth in terms of their expectations for Social Media Marketing.

I’ll do you a favor. You can skip the annoying registration form required to view the survey and read the highlights here, thanks to CNET.

• More than half of marketers use social media, but based on responses, their enthusiasm is tempered, suggesting that the peak of inflated expectations has passed; marketers are focused on finding the value that social channels can yield with more targeted insights and actions.
• Nearly 60 percent of respondents listed “measurement, analysis, and learning” as their top information technology bottleneck, whereas last year, they overwhelmingly viewed “IT support of marketing needs” at the top.
• More than 60 percent identified “turning data into action” as their top organizational issue.
• Marketers are getting more serious about using cross-channel attribution to understand marketing effectiveness.

As CNET writer Dave Rosenberg noted, “Possibly the most important finding from the survey is the fact that marketers themselves have reset their expectations, which will undoubtedly help their clients and companies make better decisions.”

OK, yes, it is good news that marketers no longer expect a corporate Twitter handle — especially one that requires Legal to approve all tweets — to instantly gain 50,000 followers. Hurrah!

However, we need to be just a tad cautious about phrases such as “turning data into action.” Why?

First, in my experience, few marketers have the web analytics insights (either in terms of knowledge or access) to be impactful. As an industry, we are working on that … but it is often a slog.

Second, what types of “action” are we trying to motivate? For smart marketers, knowing “what works, what drives traffic, what drives engagement” will lead to more of the “good stuff.” For less-than-great marketers, using such data to drive action might lead to spam, and/or a focus on revenue-for-revenue’s-sake versus revenue-that-comes-from-genuine-engagement-and-good-deeds.

I am all for making a buck, but part of the magic of Social Media has been its ability to motivate companies to humanize and empathize and socialize with consumers. That’s “action,” too, but it’s all too hard to peg into a spreadsheet.

Continue reading here: Social Media's Generation Gap

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