Businesses are still awkwardly fumbling around on social networks without much long-term planning, according to a survey of nearly 700 social strategists, hinting that social platforms like Facebook and Twitter have plenty of headroom to sell more ads.
Just 12 percent of businesses planned social media strategies beyond next year and just 34 percent say their companies have developed clear metrics to connect their social media activity to goals like profit growth, said the survey, by management consultancy Altimeter Group. Meanwhile only 52 percent of those surveyed agreed with the statement “Top executives are informed, engaged, and aligned with our social strategy.”
The general state of social-media affairs in corporate America was well summarized by Ford Chief Marketing Officer Jim Farley, who told Altimeter, “We’re in the awkward teenage years where we have a strategy but it’s not executed in the same way in all parts of the company.” This sort of flailing is reflected in depressed spending on social media activity in comparison with traditional media (see chart at right).
Altimeter is pushing a vision in which companies progress through six stages of “social business transformation,” from “planning” to “presence” to “engagement” to “formalized” to “strategic” to “converged,“ presumably engaging Altimeter’s services along the way.
Whether or not this six-step journey is precisely how companies will evolve, the long-term potential for social-media giants like Facebook and Twitter seems clear: Most businesses are only just starting to get to the point where they consider spending money on social advertisements, meaning there is still a lot of convincing to do -– and still a lot of potential revenue to be tapped.
