Last week I reported on the expected increase in social media spend from an already high 7.4% of marketing budgets to 10.4% within a year and 19.5% within five years. It is therefore both interesting and somewhat disturbing that we continue to see a sizable fissure between what companies are doing with social media and what they are doing with the rest of their strategies. I asked CMOs to rate “How effectively is social media integrated with your firm’s marketing strategy” on a seven point scale where 7 is “very integrated” and 1 is “not at all integrated.” Results from The CMO Survey indicate an average score of 3.8 with a standard deviation of 2.0. Sadly, only 7 percent of respondents believe that social media is “very integrated” to the firm’s strategy while 18.4% rated social media as “not at all integrated.” The full distribution of responses is shown in Figure 1.
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Christine Moorman is the Director of The CMO Survey and the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.
Recent Blog Posts
- Spending on Marketing Analytics
- CMOs on Economic Recovery: A Look at the Long Climb Out
- The Social Media Integration Gap
- Social Media Spend Continues to Soar
- Top Marketers See U.S. Economy on the Rebound
- Investing in Marketing Knowledge
- A Fast Boat to China: Notes on Marketing
- Who Outsources Marketing?
- Outsourcing Marketing
- Holding on to Marketing Leaders
- Investing in Social Media
- What Customers Want
- The Marketing Goals-Marketing Performance Gap
- The Lure of Disintermediation
- Economic Downturn and Company Truths
- How Much Firms Spend on Marketing
Blog Index
- Customers(5)
- Firm Performance(3)
- Social Media(7)
- Marketing Jobs(7)
- Marketing Metrics(20)
The CMO Survey Blog
The Social Media Integration Gap
Social Media Spend Continues to Soar
Results from The CMO Survey, February 2012 indicate that marketers continue to increase spend on social media. In the next 5 years, marketers expect to spend 19.5% of their budgets on social media, almost three times more than the current level! Within a year, marketers expect to spend 10.8% of their budgets on social media. These figures deserve a deeper investigation into what has been happening over time. First, social media spend, as a percent of marketing budgets has continued to increase over the last 2.5 years I have been measuring these levels in The CMO Survey. From the initial level of 3.5% in August 2009, we have witnessed an 111% increase to the current levels at 7.4% (see Figure 1).
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Investing in Social Media
The August 2011 CMO Survey reported that companies are increasing spend on social media (from current levels of 7.1 percent of marketing budget to 10.1 percent over the next year and to 17.5 percent in the next five years). These are big numbers and they have been waved around a lot on the internet. What’s striking to me is these same companies report that they employ, on average, only two people dedicated to actually doing social media (standard deviation 4.8). Houston, we have a problem—well, maybe three problems. (more…)
Social Media and Strategy: How to Integrate
In the social media integration report card, I offered a set of company behaviors that we can use to diagnose how well a firm integrates social media into its strategy. These behaviors range from integrating social media with customer management, brand management, and innovation management to monitoring information flows within the company. (more…)
Keywords: integration, manage, organization, social media, strategy
A Social Media Integration Report Card
Is your company being strategic about social media?
The August 2011 CMO Survey reported that companies are increasing spend on social media (from current levels of 7.1 percent of marketing budget to 10.1 percent over the next year and to 17.5 percent in the next five years). (more…)
Keywords: customers, integration, marketing, organization, social media, strategy
Fasten Your Social Media Seatbelts: Marketers Ready for Full Take-off
Is social media just a tool kids can use to communicate with their friends, or is there some marketing advantage? For years, marketers have been grappling with if and how social media should be deployed. Numerous findings are showing a definitive answer: marketers are embracing social media in major ways—most notably their budgets. (more…)
Keywords: social media, Spending
As CMOs See It: Dramatic Improvements On All Economic Fronts
The results of the February 2011 CMO Survey are in and the news is unequivocally positive. 421 top marketers shared their views to create the following portrait of healthy economy-wide, firm, and job effects. (more…)
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The CMO Survey Mission
The CMO Survey collects and disseminates the opinions of top marketers in order to predict the future of markets, track marketing excellence, and improve the value of marketing in firms and in society.
