Presenter: Forrester analyst David Card – @davidcard
Number of people not participating in social media is going down dramatically. Spectators are going up by the biggest margin.
Theme: successful social media initiatives help marketers make more with less
US marketers increase social budgets in downturn. Social media leads interactive budget increases. Average budget for social programs less than $100,000.
Most social marketing disappointments can be blamed on:
* Audience or brand misalignment
* Objective or measurement misalignment
* Social technology misalignment
* Channel coverage failure
Examples of some missed marks:
Wal-Mart: Great work with Wal-Mart 11 (mom blogger campaign. But some misalignment. Did community site about Twilight when that video came out. Wasn’t natural. Mixed results with its Q&A Exchange.
Lakeland: Good site, but not great implementation of ratings and reviews. No ratings on line page, can’t sort by high/low, favorite. Prominent links to badly reviewed products.
Whole Foods: Generally quite good, but had issue with CEO posting anonymously about stock. “The world finds out.” Now, using social media well on Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Sears: Arrive Lounge targeted tweens, teens. Music-oriented. All good with those. But fell short with media skills – shopping links skewed too young, Sears put together odd assembly of links.
Best practice:
Access Group  (loans to college students) UGC contest: Part of contest on YouTube – “fished where the fish were.” Big benefits of PR, blog outreach. Used insights in print campaign.
On innovation:
“You can use a relatively low-cost social initiative to get your groove on with innovation tactics.”
Key Takeaways
* Successful social initiatives can highlight marketing
* Elevate social in the media mix; move to the end of the funnel
* Innovate via social integration
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People reacted to this story.
Show comments Hide commentsIt must be I’m misunderstanding and yet it’s not intellect. “Number of people not participating in social media is going down dramatically. Spectators are going up by the biggest margin.” The first sentence tells me that more people are participating in social media it sounds askew like our political spin doctors. 🙂 Sorry no disrespect it must be my understanding if it’s not clear because it’s not succinct to me personally.
The rest of the article is very well done and it’s interesting to see the change between 2007 and 2008 and how they are impacting social media as of 2008.
I particularly liked your case studies prefacing the relevant screen shots. It seems that some of the big players have utilized social media and have fallen short. It’ll be interesting to see how they have learned from it and what adaptations they make to create a successful second campaign.
Appreciate Forrester Research keeping up on things and once again the confusion could just be me.
Hi James, what I meant to report was that there are fewer people not
participating, so more people are participating. BUT the people
participating are generally low-involvement consumers like blog readers or
video viewers, rather than the content creators who are often thought of as
the core of social media users.
David Card did a fine job with that distinction. I was just racing to cover
it and it understandably got a little muddled in the translation.
Thanks for your feedback.