Dive Brief:
- A Marketing Executives Networking Group survey finds senior marketing executives haven’t embraced social media.
- Thirty-nine percent of those surveyed believe social media metrics are not useful, and 55% percent found social media “intrusive.”
- "We use that data to add more fuel to the fire," Opher Kahane, CEO of Origami Logic, a marketing intelligence platform, told ClickZ. However, he added, "different demographics emerge and disappear on social all the time ... [so to] spend heavily on all channels doesn’t make sense."
Dive Insight:
Chalk it up to a possible generational divide, or maybe just the ability -- or lack thereof -- to drill the data down to return on investment, but senior-level executives are at best on the fence about the utility of social media according to results from a recent Marketing Executives Networking Group survey. In a sign of a potential generation gap, 55% of surveyed senior marketing executives said social media was “intrusive,” and 39% reported that social media analytics aren’t actionable.
Origami Logic's Kahane said, “We use social data to measure sentiment surrounding the campaign. For example, when we work with large global brands, like Visa, the measurement they care about across paid and earned has to do with whether or not their spend in a particular area is efficient. And if they see a piece performing well in a particular area, they can take the creative aspect and repackage it, put more spend behind that piece of content and use it more broadly.”
Maybe senior marketing executives are failing to see the social media forest for metaphorical tree trunks in analytics reports. Social media platforms are a key part of listening to, and understanding, an audience in today’s customer-led marketing world.
