Brands aren’t doing enough to Engage Consumers on Social Platforms.

A new report published by Razorfish indicates that about 33 percent of consumers are not connecting with brands on social networks — creating a large, untapped audience for marketers willing to adapt to the social world. Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report urges marketers to change the way they build relationships with consumers by abandoning one-way messaging and engaging with them on an authentic, personal level.

Fluent examines the rise of Social Influence Marketing – the method of employing social media and social influencers to meet a company’s business and marketing objectives. The three-part report features a new proprietary survey that explores how social media informs consumer purchase behavior, and introduces the SIM Score – a new benchmark Razorfish developed to measure a brand’s social influence and favorability relative to its competitors. Fluent also contains a collection of essays on topics such as using Twitter to build a better brand.

“Social media has quickly become one of the most talked-about topics in marketing. We didn’t want this report to just be more of the same, so instead we took a different, more scientific approach to evaluating this phenomena and measuring its effects,” said Shiv Singh, VP and Global Social Media Lead at Razorfish. “Today, a brand’s actions speak louder than its words and pushing out messages is no longer enough to excite and engage consumers.”

Razorfish surveyed 1,000 consumers who reported both social media and e-commerce activity, in an effort to discover how social media and different social influencers affect purchasing decisions. The survey unearthed important implications for marketers, such as:

* Brands must identify who influences perception. It is important to distinguish the type of influencer – offline peers, blogs, anonymous reviews, etc. – who affect brand affinity and purchase intent, noting this group will change as customers move through the marketing funnel.

* Social media platforms require a new type of marketing language. Consumers engage more with brands with credible voices. They should be more participatory, humble, personal and authentic than that of traditional advertising messages – brands must develop social voices

* Brands who provide value to consumers are rewarded by customer loyalty. Of those surveyed, 57% said they visited brand fan pages at least once every few weeks or months, proving consumers are not simply forming these affiliations and forgetting about them. If a brand provides current, relevant content, consumers will engage with it.

Razorfish developed a new index, the SIM Score, to determine how a brand is being talked about online. Collaborating with partners TNS Cymfony and the Keller Fay Group, Razorfish measured two factors, “reach” and “likeability,” to establish a brand’s SIM Score relative to its competitors. Recognizing the obvious problem of discounting offline influence, Razorfish also factored in word-of-mouth data from the real world. The report determined a SIM Score of 5-6 companies within four industries- financial services, pharmaceuticals, media and auto. In the auto industry, for example, Ford comes out on top with a SIM of 31, beating out Honda, GM, Nissan and Toyota.

“We believe that in time a brand’s SIM score will be just as important as other industry indexes, like a Net Promoter Score, are today,” Singh said. “Being able to quantify and track a brand’s relative health on the social Web provides marketers with a vital benchmark not previously considered in Social Influence Marketing.”

To download report CLICK on link below:
http://fluent.razorfish.com