I am always try to browse 123 Social Media and there was a great post by Barry Hurd called Social Media Benefits – Marketing Comes With a Warning Label. In the post Barry talks about the disconnect between Customer Engagement and Customer Service in the graph shown on this page. There is also a huge dissconnect between business owners and the use of social media marketing.
The entire graph makes a lot of sense except for the bottom of the graph where Customer Service is listed at 17.5%.
We could go into an entire post about the benefits of Social Media to customer service but I wanted to focus on what Barry was talking about in his post.
The Concept of Having An Open Mind with Social Media
As you can tell by the graph, customer engagement is the top reason why Marketing Executives would use Social Media Marketing. I have been preaching this ever since I started my blog. Social Media is very much a “brand development” tool for small business. It is hard to use Social Media for lead generation sources (though it is starting to shift towards the positive on this subject).
As we enter 2009, marketers of all shapes and sizes need to be more open to the idea of adding an element of social media into their marketing mix. With the Internet growing and sites like Facebook and Myspace churning millions upon millions of people daily, it is the time to start focusing on using this medium of promotion.
So why is it hard for marketers to have an open mind about social media?
It isn’t fully explained!
Marketers and Social Media Mavens need to work together in order to focus on a workable model for ROI and brand development on the Internet. Both parties need an open mind to work together in order to keep the “Integrity” of the tool while building a tangible benefit.
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Good observation- I believe the hardest part for marketers “keeping an open mind” is due to how vast social media is.
Social Media isn’t just a singular category like newspaper ads or buying swag pens for a conference. No… its is like pulling the whole entire “marketing mix” back and stamping “version 2.0″ on it and re-hashing everything that may be old… which is now new again.
Twitter, Youtube, Blogging, Facebook, Linkedin, etc are all entirely different classifications of social media. Yes they all live on the web, but Facebook is not Linkedin. We have a lot of Apples and Oranges being compared in the social media world.
I think that is hard for them. Most tried traditional online marketing and are now trying to categorize that experience with 1000′s of new options.
Pretty scary evolution eh? One day you have 100 options…. the next day you have 10,000.
~Barry
I can’t understand why some marketers are slow to adopt social media. I would be interested to see if it had anything to do with the age of the marketers in question. I wonder if someone out there has generation-related statistics? I’m sure its not as simple as this but would still be interested to see the demographics.
But the chart was a survey of US Marketing Executives, NOT of US Customers. I have a feeling the opinions of Marketing Executives (who usually aren’t responsible for Customer Service) probably simply don’t care about the social media benefits with respect to customer service.
They should because Customer Service has a direct impact on retention… but it’s a difficult line to draw internal to a company!
Oh so true that social media is not fully explained. It’s important for any marketing types to spend some time looking and listening on the various mediums to see how people are using the networks and what any of the advantages and/or drawbacks of adding a social media strategy to their marketing mix would be.