According to a new poll of brand marketers by Harris Interactive for Buddy Media, 72% of brand managers agree that social media offers great potential to reach existing and potential customers across the globe, but they are lacking tools and information to leverage it successfully. On the heels of Facebook's announcement that it has reached 500 million users worldwide, the largest and fastest-growing two-way communication platform in the world, few companies are using Facebook to reach customers globally. According to the poll only one-third of large companies with revenues in excess of $100M are currently using Facebook to do so. The biggest obstacles brand managers at large companies face when using social media to reach customers globally, says the report, include: Managing and maintaining information; Measuring success; and Keeping region and country-specific content fresh. Major Obstacles in Using Social Media to Reach Local Market Customers(% of Brand Managers)Obstacle% of Respondents Agreeing Tracking or measuring success or ROI 48% Managing information 45 Engaging audience 42 Identifying influencers to carry brand message 39 Keeping specific content fresh 32 Posting multimedia content 28 Tracking real time metrics 24 Finding creative for online social marketing 23 Tools to customize content anywhere 22 Source: Buddy Media / Harris Interactive, August 2010 Michael Lazerow, CEO and Founder of Buddy Media, says "... in order for bands to effectively reach consumers across the globe, they need to ... think global and act local... cost, scale, segmented audiences, inconsistent design and incomplete analytics... all local branding dilemmas... when it comes to social marketing." The study found that 93% of marketers considered it at least somewhat challenging to reach audiences in local markets with a unified brand message, and the most popular tactics used to market to local audiences were websites with local content (69%), print ads (62%) and event promotion (59%). Less than half of respondents used social media fan pages for this purpose, and less than one in three used paid social media advertising. The. Websites with local content were considered the most effective tactic, named by 30% of brand marketers, compared with just 10% who thought fan pages were best. Very Effective Tactics for Reaching Local Market Customers(% of US Brand Managers, June 2010)Tactic% of Respondents Websites with local content 30% TV ads 18 Print ads 15 Local programs offering products 11 Radio ads 10 Social media fan pages 10 Paid social media 7 Banner ads 5 Text messages 3 Source: Buddy Media / Harris Interactive, August 2010 Please visit here for more information and access to the PDF file of the study.
I guess that MG Siegler's column yesterday on TechCrunch, asking whether Facebook should adopt a friend and a follower system, resonated with me because I've been thinking about the nature of my social networking relationships lately as well. I finally got around to decoupling my tweets from my status updates earlier this month -- 15 seconds that I should have found in my schedule at least a year ago. The problem was that I was concerned my worlds were intermingling too much -- more than I, or those in my Twitter and Facebook circles, wanted them to. I do a fair amount of outreach on Twitter for the various projects that constitute my living. My friends on Facebook, though originally made up largely of professional friends -- because soccer Moms and college friends hadn't yet discovered it -- had turned more into a place where they ruled the day. And, though no offense is meant to my "professional" Facebook friends, having discussions about why the kids have yet another half day off from school seems much more in context on Facebook to me than ones debating the virtues of the iPhone 4. So, as Twitter and Facebook began to evolve, I began to grow uncomfortable with the spillover between the two. Did the professional crowd get tired of my 140-character laments about my almost daily trips to CVS? Did friends and family wonder why I would express any interest in recruiting them for a panel at the Social Media Insider Summit (plug!) or share a story about market share of the Android platform? Fortunately, everyone was too polite to write obnoxious stuff about my confused life on my wall, but still ... it was high time that I tried to bring method to my social networking madness. But let's get back to Siegler's central question: do quandaries like mine mean Facebook should adopt a friend and a follower system? That's a tough one. You could say that social networking -- even just Facebook itself -- already has such a thing. Twitter can be for Twitter-type relationships, while Facebook can be for friends. You can also separate your Facebook friends into groups, but I don't think that really solves the problem that Siegler sees. His theory is that, with 500 million users, for many people Facebook is the be-all and end-all for social networking, and thus, particularly as it adds new features like Facebook Places, it has to adjust its social graph accordingly. Do we really want to share our whereabouts with our 400 Facebook friends? He says: " [I]n their drive to be the center of the social web and promote sharing (of links, of data, of information, of everything), Facebook is mutating. The problem is that the original social graph isn't built for this mutation. And we're going to see that very clearly with things like this new location element. "Facebook wants us to share things more openly, but with Places, they have launched a feature that most people will want to keep close to the vest. They can't have it both ways, right?" So, what do you think? Should Facebook introduce a friends-and-followers system, or is this whole idea just a bit of late August mental meandering? A problem that already has good solutions?