Internal or external resources, agencies, consultants or publishers? Many companies still give the responsibility for social media to the hands of the existing marketing and communications teams. A new study by the public relations agency MS&L and PR Week shows that companies leave it to these teams to handle the activities. Only 5% said they outcource the social media planning and execution to external agency partners.
It is still interesting to see which companies are addressed to get the responsible for their social media activities...
- 21% direct marketing agencies
- 20% ad agencies
- 17% digital agencies
- 16% PR agencies
- 12% media buying and planning agencies
In the online survey with 262 marketers taking part, 47% of those with social media programs handle social media activities using in-house resources. Some companies are hiring their expertise: 13% stated additional staff was recruited to handle the conversations.
Most companies understand the impact for business. The reason why companies make it a business critical topic becomes clear when 79% agree social media management and reacting in real-time to customer needs is a competitive advantage. 26% encourage their employees to share social media input for the company's benefit. The effect on R&D is in between the lines of the result that 33% of companies have changed their products or marketing efforts based on feedback they've gathered from social media.
Interestingly enough Social Media education comes from...? Kids (26%)! - Coming in as third important source after internal discussions (46%) and vendor sponsored conferenes and webinars (33%), says the report. This result actually comes at the same time as a study by Nielsen Norman Group that comes to a similar conclusion. Kids are not even 10 years old to tell us more about the Internet than we might know but still get confused by advertising if it is directed towards them.
Spot On!
Social Web experts argue the aspect of a cultural shift - handling social media is a challenge for the whole company and all departments - be it HR, R&D, Sales, PR, Marketing or Customer Service. If we look at who is responsible when the social media business is outsourced, it becomes obvious that traditional agencies are the leading edge of the social media activities. Sometimes, I am asking myself, if companies like business consultants (whole company approach), strategy consultants (business model apporach) or even publishers (experts in audience building) could not be a better partner for making social media strategy work.
Curious to listen what your ideas about that might be...
©2010 The Strategy Web. All Rights Reserved.
.