Spending continues to increase on social media for marketing
Veritas, a Canadian PR company, are launching a new practice focusing on social media. The official release describes the new group thus:
com.motion is a specialty practice within Veritas Communications that helps brands and organizations to break through online. With tactics including blogger relations, online reputation management, social media marketing campaigns and the proprietary Grassroots Multiplier™, com.motion is at the leading edge of Direct Audience Activation: the next evolution in marketing communications.
That’s a perfect piece of PR speak, but the team lead Keith McArthur as been putting his money where his mouth is and reaching out to bloggers to promote a new survey they have put together to take a look at social media use in Canada and Canadian business. A surprising number of surveys are put together by PR agencies to promote clients - remember the one about women’s walking wiggle. Some are poor I agree, but many actually do add value and valid data to discussions and this survey looks like it’s got some great stuff for those following the development of social media usage. I got an early look at some of the results, asking about changes in spend on social media and also about attitudes to social media tools and their importance to promote products and services.
Out of 444 self-qualified respondents who work in marketing or senior management you got the following results:
Q: Looking forward to 2008, do you plan to spend more money on social media marketing, less money on social media marketing or about the same amount as you spent in 2007?
| More | 12% |
| Same | 39% |
| Less | 2% |
| We spend nothing now and won’t change | 32% |
| No answer | 15% |
The follow-up questions looked at where the money is coming from:
Which, if any, of the following will you cut back on in order to increase your social media budget?
| No cuts, increasing overall budget | 31% |
| Direct Mail | 28% |
| Print Advertising | 26% |
| Radio Advertising | 16% |
| No idea yet | 12% |
| TV Advertising | 9% |
| Other web advertising | 4% |
| Other | 2% |
| No answer | 4% |
The favourite place to cut is in Direct Mail, a channel that can connect directly with users in the same way social media can, but the latter can be more efficient in resource use. Looking at the attitude to the the tools, there a many who believe in their strength and potential and interestingly the numbers are pretty similar across age groups (assuming that poisition has some correlation with age). Only about 1 in 8 people believe that it is all a fad which is lower than I expected, so that has to be good news.
| Social media tools like Facebook, YouTube and blogs have forever changed the communications landscape and are becoming more important than communications tools such as television, radio, newspapers and magazines | Social media tools like Facebook, YouTube and blogs are important, but will never be as powerful a communications tool as television, radio, newspapers and magazines | Social media tools like Facebook, YouTube and blogs are a fad. | |
| Total | 46 | 39 | 15 |
| Company Owner/ Board of Directors | 49 | 36 | 15 |
| Executive Management | 45 | 43 | 12 |
| Senior Marketing/ Communications/ Public Relations Management | 41 | 44 | 16 |
| Junior Marketing/ Communications/ Public Relations | 49 | 33 | 17 |
There’s more information in the survey and you can get further information from Keith’s blog or from a special poll site (which is not live until later Monday)
Tags: socialmedia, veritasRelated Stories
POSTED IN: Advertising Agencies
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