Churchill famously said there are lies, damned lies and statistics, so it’s always dangerous to start quoting figures.
It’s estimated that around a quarter of all search results for the world’s top 20 brands are links to user-generated contact and around a third of bloggers post opinions about products and brands, so we can begin to understand why some of the big brands put so much time and energy into managing their social media activity.
Interestingly the fastest growing group of Facebook users are women aged 55 to 65, so it’s no longer acceptable to say it’s only the young that do social media and it really goes to show how the phenomenon has spread in a relatively short time – it took radio and TV much longer to catch on and become widely accessible to majority of the population.
More and more, people are basing their buying decisions on what they see and hear using social media – YouTube is one of the world’s largest search engines.
And rather than just promoting CSR and brands, companies now use social media for specific purposes, for example, for recruitment.
So we live in a world where products and brands come searching for us rather than the other way round. But some companies that want PR and brand management support, want to ignore the social media revolution. It can’t be done. Doing nothing is no longer an option.
There are all sorts of reasons why these reluctant people haven’t joined the social media revolution, and the usual ones are trust in the concept or that ‘our customers aren’t the sort that would use it’.
In fact, this is probably based on their own reluctance to get stuck in rather than anyone else’s resistance to their messages, coupled with a complete misunderstanding as to how their business would benefit.
Tags: design, Marketing, public relations, search engines, SME's
