Interactive Marketing Blog

Despite the cultural phenomenon and much hyped social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace have become in the past few years, 55% of top-brand CMOs said they’re not too interested (22%), or not interested at all (33%), in incorporating these and similar social-networking sites into their marketing strategies, according to a survey by Epsilon. (Source- Marketing Charts)

The graph below shows the true story:

Now I posted a random question (Tweet Link) in twitter about it. And here are few responses from my network:

1. Anil says (Tweet Link) it’s time consuming since there is so much to do in social networks especially Facebook with all those generated apps.

2. Ravi says (Tweet Link) social networks are complex in their own ways. Also people are shifting to newer nicher social community like Twitter which works like Humans i.e. conversation based human network.

3. Naresh says (Tweet Link) that he’s hooked more to look at birthdays, photos, personal info like phone etc.

4. Many others like Meowable and Arjun has similar to say.

Few more reasons cited in the article are:

• The social networking sites narrowly appeal to college and high school students, providing a challenge as far as measuring results and yielding a limited amount of actionable data, said Steve Cone, CMO of Epsilon.
• Retailers see 20 cents in e-commerce revenue for every email delivered, showing the measurability and profitability of the email channel in times when people are seeking those two attributes, said by Kevin Mabley, SVP, Epsilon Strategic Services, who also said marketers are still placing value on email.

Now looking at this issue yields few thoughts:

1. Firstly, due to less measurability parameters its sort of difficult for advertisers to rely on social networks since ROI becomes murky with complexity.

2. Secondly, I still believe that social networks are not out of the scope to lure advertisers primarily because of demographics, key influencers, word-of-mouth and referrals that social networks generates. I wrote about it sometime back (Click here).

Until then it would be interesting to see how advertisers, marketers and brand specialists react to this in due course of time. So what are you thoughts on this? Do you think it’s high time for marketers to look for alternative medium or social networking still has some steam left?