CMO’s love this s&*% (Myspace and Facebook)…but won’t buy on it (and should probably stick to email).
This is a summary of a research article delivered by OMMA.
While chief marketing officers are intrigued by social networking sites Facebook and MySpace as potential marketing vehicles, actually using them is another matter.
More than one-quarter (27%) of consumer and B-to-B chief marketing executives surveyed online in late October 08 by GfK Roper Public Relations and Media for marketing services firm Epsilon identified social networking and word-of-mouth as the tools they would most like to introduce to their marketing mix to compensate for anticipated budget cuts—ahead of all other traditional or digital marketing channels.
However, more than half (55%) of the 180 responding chief marketers—representing brands with revenues ranging from $250 million to more than $10 billion—indicated low current interest in actually incorporating the networking sites into their plans.
One-third said they’re “not interested at all” in getting Facebook and MySpace into their plans, and 22% said they’re “not too interested,” while 35% are very or somewhat interested.
To put it more bluntly, marketers don’t care about teenagers sharing photographs with one another. And while companies can post their own products or marketing-oriented profiles on these sites, site users “are likely to turn off” if they see too much marketing on these kinds of channels, which they consider vehicles for personal communications, he adds.
In contrast, marketers have plenty of proof that email works. Epsilon’s latest benchmark stats show that retailers, for example, realize 20 cents in e-commerce revenue for every email delivered. Email’s measurable profitability obviously makes it attractive to marketers—particularly during a time of budget cutbacks, notes Kevin Mabley, SVP, Epsilon Strategic Services.
Indeed, responding marketers confirmed that email is the medium they are least likely to cut back on in the face of anticipated budget reductions for the year ahead.
