57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their customer blog

Improve customer service by speeding up customer problem resolution

Identify and engage top influencers and understand how they’re influencing others buying decisions.

Improve ability to identify and reduce risk (BIC 82%, Avg 9% of companies saw improvement)

Improve customer advocacy (BIC 75%, Avg 9% of companies saw improvement)

Organization: Top-level support and a dedicated resource team devoted to social media activities, including analyzing and reporting, are essential to properly leverage social media and SMM.

Knowledge: Marketing executives are now being tasked with regular communications with customers to obtain their needs. Regular interaction enables companies to respond to their customers’ needs and this data can be warehoused for further analysis. Marketing executives will also be tasked with figuring out which social media outlets are most effective. Marketing professionals need to be not only analytical but digitally savvy, creative in driving inbound traffic and good communicators, as they will be speaking to consumers one-to-one and in a very public way.

Technology: A number of best-in-class companies are deploying branded social networks and digital dashboards for their consumers. These will of course be a resource for collecting consumer data, which will also require data warehousing technologies. “These [technologies] make it possible to do deeper dives into specific data, and to slice and dice the data in multiple ways to reveal additional patterns and insights.”

Performance Management: These Best-In-Class companies also have defined performance metrics allowing them to measure and increase the value of social media to their business strategy. With social media and SMM still emerging these metrics are still very experimental some examples include, reduction in inbound customer support calls, increase in positive consumer sentiment, and quantity and quality of consumer insights from social media. Conclusion<br />Social media and social media monitoring, if effectively leveraged, enables firms to obtain consumer insights that used to be secured only through costly consumer focus groups. The shift of the consumer’s attention to online channels, the quantity and quality of data that can be collected, the lower cost per lead, the conversion of leads to sales, and the reduction of customer service costs are all solid reasons for companies to integrate social media into their marketing and business strategy. However, this is not a call to abandon traditional media all together. Companies must always be aware of their strategies and goals for the enterprise before making decisions that involve major shifts such as this one. Knowing what your objectives are and the messages you are trying to get out to your customer will enable your firm to make the appropriate decisions as to which forms of social media to utilize. Because the technology is rapidly changing and relatively new it would be unwise to make a complete switch to social media and abandon all other forms of traditional media. <br />“Failure to consider the total impact of one driver on sales – and thereby allocating budgets based only on the direct impact associated with each driver – could cause executives to misallocate their marketing dollars.” When making your marketing mix decisions it is important to keep in mind the diminishing economic returns of each media channel, the interaction effects between channels (such as television campaigns that drive consumers to your blog which then converts to a sale), and separation of causality (internal and external competitive forces). <br />