Is social media marketing successful?

That was the question posed by a new infographic shared on Mashable yesterday. And, it continues the debate on whether social media marketing works on a single dimension — ROI. While the title questions the success of social media marketing efforts, the data inside seem to show marketing folks have a positive outlook on social media marketing. But, you be the judge. Here’s the infographic from PageModo:

Social media marketing successful; despite unmeasurable ROI

Those of you who regularly read my posts (thank you VERY MUCH) know I take a dim view on using ROI as the arbiter of social media marketing success. While ROI is a good metric for judging sales, production, investment, and other business functions, it’s pretty poor for judging marketing efforts unless you’re talking about couponing, discounting, some B2B marketing activities, or other pricing-related marketing functions.

That’s because the goal of most other marketing efforts is to affect consumer attitudes, not DIRECTLY affect their behavior. That’s because we can more effectively drive sales by creating positive attitudes about the brand than actually changing behaviors — the only way to DIRECTLY change behavior is to make it easier for someone to buy your brand. To directly affect behavior, you’re talking about making it cheaper or offering financing to make it easier to afford the product, or making it more readily available so consumers don’t have to exert much effort to buy the product. These things are VERY expensive and WON’T work unless the consumer already likes the brand.

Therefore, it’s more effective and cheaper to work on changing consumer attitudes (albeit with some efforts toward making it easier to buy the brand). That’s because we know positive attitudes affect behavior and we know these attitudes are a function of what your friends think about your brand as well as your own beliefs about the brand. Marketing researchers have shown this concept, originally developed by Fishbein and Ajzen in the mid 1970′s, works in almost every context.

While we KNOW attitudes drive consumer behaviors (especially buying behavior), we also know there’s a lag between changing the attitude and increasing the behavior. The length of that lag is based on a large number of factors including product features, such as durability, and consumer features, such as need and money. So, calculating an exact ROI for branding and other marketing efforts whose main purpose is to change attitudes is not very accurate. And, making decisions based on inaccurate measures of ROI leads firms to make bad decisions.

This is especially true in social media marketing, where we’re changing consumer attitudes using a media where transmission is slow — moving from one consumer to their social network and being shared again by members of that network. But, using social media rather than traditional media to transmit the firms message increases social media marketing success because

Article source: http://www.business2community.com/social-media/is-social-media-marketing-successful-0184350

EXHIBITOR Research: Social Media Marketing for Exhibit Programs Increases by Nearly 90%

Follow-up to 2010 Survey Indicates Social Media a Powerful Tool for Face-to-Face Marketers
 
ROCHESTER, MN – May 31, 2012 – EXHIBITOR Media Group, the leader in trade show and corporate event marketing education, today announced the results of EXHIBITOR Magazine’s 2012 Social-Media Marketing Survey, sponsored by Lynch Exhibits Inc.  Following a 2010 benchmark survey, new data shows that the percentage of marketers using social media in their exhibition programs increased by nearly 90 percent.
 
Eight out of ten marketers say their companies are currently using social media for a variety of purposes, including exhibit marketing (58 percent), event marketing (36 percent), and other general marketing purposes (67 percent).
 
Those tapping into the marketing potential of social-media applications claim increased brand awareness, enriched relationships with clients and prospects, increased booth traffic and event attendance, additional press coverage, and increased sales as direct results of their campaigns. Yet fewer marketers are proactively setting measurable objectives to track the success or failure of their online efforts.
 
“It’s clear that the use of social media as a marketing tool has exploded over the past two years,” commented Travis Stanton, editor of EXHIBITOR magazine. “And while there are still challenges, including lack of time and resources, most respondents agree that social media is a powerful tool for face-to-face marketers.”
 
Comprehensive results of the 2012 Social-Media Marketing Survey will be published in the June issue of EXHIBITOR magazine.
 
About EXHIBITOR Media Group
The leader in trade show and corporate event marketing education, EXHIBITOR Media Group publishes EXHIBITOR magazine, a monthly publication featuring best practices in trade show marketing. EXHIBITOR’s Learning Events include: EXHIBITOR2011, the industry’s top-rated conference and exhibition for trade show and corporate event marketing; EXHIBITORFastTrak, accelerated learning conferences; and EXHIBITOR eTrak, professional online learning. EXHIBITOR Media Group is also the founder and sponsor of CTSM (Certified Trade Show Marketer), the world’s only university-affiliated certification program for trade show and event marketers. EXHIBITOR’S web site, www.ExhibitorOnline.com, is the trade show/event community’s most comprehensive online resource. Follow on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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In 2004, a trio of researchers at Columbia University began an online experiment in social-media marketing, creating nine versions of a music-download site that presented the same group of unknown songs in different ways. The goal of the experiment was to gauge the effect of early peer recommendations on the songs’ success; the researchers found that different songs became hits on the different sites and that the variation was unpredictable.

“It’s natural to believe that successful songs, movies, books and artists are somehow ‘better,’” one of the researchers wrote in The New York Times in 2007. “What our results suggest, however, is that because what people like depends on what they think other people like, what the market ‘wants’ at any point in time can depend very sensitively on its own history.”

But for music fans who would like to think that talent is ultimately rewarded, the situation may not be as dire as the Columbia study makes it seem. In a paper published in the online journal PLoS ONE, researchers from the MIT Media Laboratory’s Human Dynamics Lab revisit data from the original experiment and suggest that it contains a clear quantitative indicator of quality that’s consistent across all the sites; moreover, they find that the unpredictability of the experimental results may have as much to do with the way the test sites were organized as with social influence.

In their analysis, Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Science, his graduate students Coco Krumme — first author on the new paper — and Galen Pickard, and Manuel Cebrian, a former postdoc at the Media Lab, developed a mathematical model that, while simple, predicts the experimental results with high accuracy. They divide the decision to download a song into two stages: first, the decision to play a sample of the song, and second, the ensuing decision to download it or not. They found that, in fact, the percentage of customers who would download a given song after sampling it was consistent across sites. The difference in download totals was due entirely to the first stage, the decision to sample a song in the first place.

And that decision, the researchers concluded, had only an indirect relationship to the songs’ popularity. In the original experiment, one of the sites was a control, while the other eight gave viewers information about the popularity of the songs, measured by total number of downloads. But on those eight sites, the number of downloads also determined the order in which the songs were displayed. The MIT researchers’ analysis suggests that song ordering may have had as much to do with the unpredictability across sites as the popularity information.

“We’ve known forever that people are lazy, and they’ll pick the songs on the top,” Pentland says. “There’s all this hype about new-age marketing and social-media marketing. Actually, it comes down to just the stuff that they did in 1904 in a country store: They put certain things up front so you’d see them.”