Social Marketing

As media companies finalize their marketing budgets for 2012, the question of how well social media investments pay off remains largely unanswered.

Clay McDaniel leads Spring Creek Group, a Seattle-based social media agency serving clients such as Microsoft, HTC and LiveNation. In a conversation with eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson, McDaniel, Spring Creek’s founder and managing partner, shares the three key ways companies use social media monitoring, why social media measurement has faced a lot of pressure to succeed, and whether it will live up to its promise.

From the early days of the internet, the prospect of detailed metrics fueled the promise that online advertising could yield unprecedented insights about customer preferences and behavior. That promise has only partially materialized. True, online channels provide feedback that offline media cannot, but marketers are still grappling with how to make this input work toward the bottom line.

‘m still not sure why Ad Age felt compelled to give a voice to hate. I mean, how else do you explain their decision to invite a bona fide prophet of hate to their upcoming “Media Evolved” conference?  Glenn Beck may be doing something interesting in media (according to Ad Age) but he’s still a racist.

Bloggers, from hobbyists to professionals, often write about brands, and their growing influence should make brand representatives continually evaluate the relationships they have with these bloggers.

As of late I’m hearing in Hispanic communications circles much ado about whether or not marketers should pay Latino bloggers for posting brand-related content, product reviews, etc. While this topic has been fully addressed in mainstream circles, the issues take on greater complexities in the Latino blogosphere.

Two-thirds of online adults (66%) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn. These internet users say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools. DOWNLOAD Report Here.

74% of businesses say social media is the leading emerging channel for lead generation. Yet, 68% of CMOs report that they feel “unprepared” for the challenges of social media marketing. DOWNLOAD Report Here.

Social media has become one of the most revealing and valuable channels of marketing insight on the planet. Finding the right consumers that match the attributes and values of your brand has never been easier with the ability to scrape and analyze social media data and personal postings and preferences. DOWNLOAD Report Here.

Mainstream news organizations have made the social media tool Twitter a daily part of how they communicate with audiences. But how do those organizations actually use the technology: How often do they tweet? What kind of news do they distribute? To what extent is Twitter used as a new reporting tool or as a mechanism for gathering insights from followers? DOWNLOAD Report Here.

Many of the Fortune 500, the largest companies in the US, are using Facebook, Twitter and corporate blogs, but not much has changed with their activity in the past year.

Social media use has become so pervasive in the lives of American teens that having a presence on a social network site is almost synonymous with being online. Fully 95% of all teens ages 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites. Many log on daily to their social network pages and these have become spaces where much of the social activity of teen life is echoed and amplified—in both good and bad ways. DOWNLOAD Report Here.