Social Business?

According to legend, Facebook was a way for geeks to meet girls.

But Facebook became much much more and other social media channels are trying to create their niche and make some bucks.

One way is to get businesses involved with social media.

Often that is handed over to the marketing department.

Which brings us to this from Sherpa:

by Kaci Bower, Research Analyst

Chart: Organizations integrating social media into the marketing mix

Q. To what extent does your organization integrate social media into the marketing mix?



Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart


Full and extensive integration is another way of saying that all touch points are being used. But doing this is easier said than done, as the chart above indicates. Only one-quarter of organizations surveyed were extensively integrating social media with both online and offline tactics, with an additional 31 percent working towards this state.

Marrying social media -- an online tactic -- with other online tactics was much more achievable to varying degrees for 32% of organizations. However, the data also suggests that organizations choose to leapfrog from limited integration with other online tactics to limited integration with both types of tactics and are bypassing the extensive online integration stage.

Strategic organizations, or those with a formalized planning process for the management and execution of social media practices, have a strong lead on other organizations when it comes to extensively integrating social media with online and offline tactics. The numbers continue to play out as expected.

Organizations still in the Trial phase -- or those with no process for performing social media -- lag when it comes to integration. These organizations are predominantly working on the first step of interconnecting social media with online tactics or are still operating their social media programs in a silo.

For additional research data and insights about email marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from the MarketingSherpa 2011 Social Marketing Benchmark Report.


ScLoHo is Scott Howard, a Solutions Consultant with Cirrus ABS.

You can contact him here: