9 social stats for marketers

HubSpot has been banging the pots loudly at Inbound (where a lot of my marketing team from HootSuite is there as the Presenting Sponsor, speakers, dressed in a giant owl costume, etc)

The HubSpot team have been peppering the awesome content on the interwebz at the same time and I loved their collection of great stats that point to the state of the nation for marketers across all the areas of tech that they provide.  The following nine social marketing stats really do paint a great story of where we are today and what the current opportunity is for us all to move the needle.

1) Failure to respond via social channels can lead to up to a 15% increase in churn rate for existing customers. (Source: Gartner) 

2) 37% of brands would like to use social media engagement to create customer-tailored marketing campaigns. (Source: Forrester) 

3) 75% of B2B companies do not measure or quantify social media engagement. (Source: Satmetrix)

4) 51% of the top 20% of B2B marketers generating leads through social media use social sharing tools, compared to the industry average of 39%. (Source: Aberdeen) 

5) 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form. (Source: Aberdeen) 

6) Marketers spend an average of 4-6 hours a week on social media. (Source: Social Media Examiner) 

7) Currently, marketers allocate 7.6% of their budgets to social media. CMOs expect that number to reach 18.8% in the next five years. (Source: CMO Survey) 

8) 60.2% of marketers are looking for analysis options, as well as other analytics options, in their social media management tools. (Source: SEOmoz) 

9) Regardless, marketers still continue to struggle with integrating social media into the company’s overall strategy. On a scale of 1-7, only 6.8% of respondents believe that social media is “very integrated” into their strategy (the highest rank for the question), while 16.7% believe that it's not integrated at all (the lowest rank for the question). (Source: CMO Survey) 

Check out the full article and stats here: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33529/33-Stats-That-Paint-a-Picture-of-the-Future-of-Marketing.aspx#ixzz24xqDSF7o

Exploring Social Business Patterns

Over the past several years I have been part of a shift in marketing, design, development and enterprise software that has undergone fundamental shifts due to changes in the patterns of management and the patterns of product development and marketing.  This shift, in its current iteration at the edges of my bubble, is the emergence of the social business or social enterprise as it is sometimes referred to.  For now, I will use these interchangeably.

In the early days at Microsoft, community and social ecosystems and the evangelist role itself emerged as answers to the need for broad, engaged conversations around complex shifts in application architecture, development and design.  We leveraged forums, community advocates, content rankings and feedback and constant customer input as both an innovation and a market driver.  At Adobe I was one of the first bloggers (IMHO was my first Adobe blog), built the first evangelism team and worked with developer relations and marketing to leverage social ecosystem development across enterprise, agency and academia as a core GTM approach.

Now at HootSuite, as my focus shifts to expanding market readiness, and hopefully market share, for our enterprise, agency and professional offerings, I have the unique perspective of flipping the mirror around and determining which of the social business patterns are going to emerge as core market drivers and to help our customers and partners understand how this has a specific and positive impact on their bottom line, market share, HR, customer satisfaction and cost of doing business.

We now stand at the brink of another fundamental shift in the way we work - shifting more and more of our activity (not enough yet IMHO) to social platforms, better exploiting our need to communicate effectively and ultimately changing the way in which we model, design, strategize, plan, implement, deliver and measure business activity.

And, while many companies claim turf in this space and large and small agencies and consultancies alike move towards the space I feel like we are lacking some of the fundamentals for comprehension of a common shift in thinking and executing. I fall back on to my days in developer tools and developer relations, our work on architectural standards at both Adobe and Microsoft, and am turning up my quest for patterns.

Following are a potential grouping of how we might categorize some of the social business patterns (based on several examples already available):

• - Business patterns of repeatable behaviour and consistent use of methodology or tools
• - Technical patterns of business enablement through provision of platforms
• - Integration patterns that exploit rampant connectivity, API and SDK model
• - Agile patterns that embrace iteration and enable constant innovation
• - Customer experience and UX patterns that redefine business models purely from the perspective of the customer/user
• - Ecosystem patterns that both map and enable the complex systems of business without borders
• 
  

This will be an exercise of research, accumulation, assimilation, creation and curation.

Well understood micro patterns such as update status, share ‘object’ with connections, notifications, and direct response, in turn see increasing value through understanding and documenting the macro-patterns that form when used in conjunction with each other and specifically change an aspect of how we do business, such as how we develop, market, sell, measure or report.

Seeking patterns of a revolution in communication that signal the growth of the social business.