ImpactWatch Blog

• Social Media ROI? Traditional Is Still More Accepted – Social Media Explorer

• Why Social Media ROI Is The Most Over Debated & Misunderstood Topic? – Social Media Marketing in India

• 5 Ways Sentiment Analysis is Ramping Up in 2009 – Read Write Web

• Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts – The New York Times

• Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet – ken Burbary

• Why Sentiment Analysis is About as Reliable as a Canary in a Coal Mine – Marketing Pilgrim

• Web 2.0 Rule #7: Social media programs are a choice, social media monitoring is NOT – CK’s Blog

• The Single PR Metric and Flying Pigs – Measurement Standard

• You are Crazy not to Measure the ROI of Social Media! – Tac Anderson

• Why Measure ROI of Social Media? – Regular Geek

• Are we too worried with finding the ROI of social media? – Mack Collier

• How To Measure Your Social Media ROI: Don’t – Social Media Today

Tools Lists

• Social Media Monitoring Tools: 26 Free Online Reputation Tools – Dan LaRusso

Presentations

• Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi – The Brand Builder

Photo courtesy of Lara604 on flickr / CC BY 2.0

Over 1,450 marketers representing brands, agencies, consultants and non-profits participated in the 2009 Marketing Industry Trends Study. The survey was developed by crowdsourcing input directly from the online marketing community.

Is your company currently using or planning to use social media? If planning, how long before implementation?

- 59% of marketers say social media is currently part of their activities.
- 28% are planning to implement social media in the future.
- 13% have no plans to engage in social media marketing.

What are the greatest barriers to social media use in your company?*

- 34% We don’t know enough about social media to begin
- 32% There’s no established way to measure the effectiveness of social media
- 25% There’s no funding in our budget for social media
- 25% Social media is not a proven/tested strategy
- 21% No time to invest in starting a social media program right now
- 20% I don’t feel there are any barriers
- 12% Legal constraints/company policy
- 9% Social media is not considered a good use of employee time

How are you measuring the effectiveness of your social media efforts?
- 63% Tracking website hits
- 43% Tracking links on sites
- 42% Monitoring qualitative feedback/sentiment from those involved with the program
- 39% Tracking mentions on sites
- 39% Tracking sales/new business leads
- 30% Measuring buzz
- 27% Using a third party tracking service or research supplier
- 8% Other
- 13% Not measuring it

Types of Social Media Used

- 82% Facebook
- 73% Twitter
- 65% Blogs
- 62% Online videos
- 31% Podcasts
- 32% Webcasts
- 30% MySpace
- 28% User forums
- 28% Widgets
- 22% Wikis
- 23% Other

Other key findings include:

- Online, Search and Social Media as a group accounts for about a third of current marketing spend. This increases to over 40% for smaller companies.
- 60% of brand marketers forecast an increase in social media spending in 2010.
- Facebook, Twitter, online video and blogs are the 4 most popular social media tools. On average, marketers are using 5 to 7 other social media tools at the same time.

Download a copy of the 2009 Marketing Industry Trends Study.

*Numbers are an average of the brand and agency numbers reported. For the exact breakdown, please see the full report.

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• Social Media Metrics: What We Need to Track Sales – Left the Box

• Social Media Monitoring: Why You Must & Its Value – Techrigy

• Make Sure Social Media Metrics Are Meaningful – IT Business Edge

• The Truth About Measuring Social Media – Nation Ranch

• Scaling Social Media – Web Trends

• Can computers take the place of the personal touch in media evaluation - Corp Comms Magazine

• Social-Media ROI Elusive: MarketingProfs Poll – Marketing Profs

• Meeting the New Media Challenge with ROI – TalentZoo

• Why Your Small Business Needs to Measure Its Return on Social Media Investments – Content Marketing Today

MarketingProfs, an online resource for marketers, released some rather interesting results from a case study they recently did.  The survey was conducted in June 2009 across several marketing and social media outlets, and it included a total of 338 completed responses.  It shows that more companies understand the relevance of using social media to grow business.

Interesting findings:

• Lack of resources was the most cited reason (30%) for lack of social media engagement.
• Almost 80% of the respondents plan to increase social media involvement in the upcoming six months.
• 87% said that social media was either “important” or “somewhat important” to their companies.

MarketingProfs has also released a study called “Social Media ROI Success Stories: How 11 companies – like OfficeMax, Nissan, BMC and Microsoft – are listening, engaging and measuring.”

“While social media marketing remains hugely popular, it’s clear from these results that few have confidence in their ability to track and measure it from an ROI perspective,” said Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs. “Until marketers figure out the measurement game, brands may resist increasing their social media investments.”

It’s interesting that lack of resources is the number one reason that companies claim lack of social media work within their business.  I would have assumed lack of tools, but perhaps there is an over-abundance of those while companies simply don’t know what to do with them.  In the coming months, there will probably be more and more listings for dedicated social media positions/jobs at major corporations.

• Best Practice Advice
  Social Media Monitoring – Listening is the new marketing! – eCircle

We’ve been saying this for a while. The customers are talking, are you listening?

• Wish List for Social Marketing Metrics – Half Rose Blog

Some good ideas for Social Media Metrics as they relate to marketing.

• Blogs and Social Media: Moving From Monitoring to Networking – yhteiskuntaetiikka.net

Great, you’re listening to the conversations about your brand or issue. What’s next? Join them.

• Social Media Metrics
• Social Media Metrics Tips from Experts
• Listening & Trust

Emerging Technologies Librarian knocked it out of the park this week with three great posts on Social Media Monitoring

• Answers to Social Media Questions You Should Know – Online Marketing Blog

Lee Odden answers questions on some Social Media basics including monitoring and third party data metrics.

Read last weeks top posts.

Photo courtesy of D Sharon Pruitt