The Struggle to Harness Social Media
There are over 800 Million active Facebook users the world over.
Everyday, 200 Million Tweets are sent out.
You Tube serves 3 Billion videos a day.
With the amount of data being sent out by social networks such as these, Marketing people are overwhelmed by the volume and are ill-equipped to harness its potential value.
An IBM study of 1700 Chief Marketing Officers found that only 26% of them track blogs and 40% track any online communications. 82% still rely on traditional market research for their marketing strategies.
There are a few companies that have adapted to the new trend. Brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Starbucks have used social media in their campaigns to find out what their customers want and to communicate with them. It has had a positive effect.
But most CMOs still have to prove that investments in social media marketing would convert to actual returns. With the sheer volume of data being put out by the networks daily, traditional computer programs are having difficulty understanding them.
These data are treated as "unstructured data" since they are not collected in databases or documents. IBM estimates that 90% of all real time data created today are unstructured.
They have spent $14 Billion in the past 5 years on acquisitions of analytics companies to fill up the demand.
At a briefing in London, IBM marketing exec, Marcel Holsheimer, told journalists, "Marketing is going to become much more an automated and software play than it was in the past. This is why IBM is now making the investment in this space."
Over at Hewlett Packard, then CEO, Leo Apotheker, bought Autonomy, a market leader in unstructured data search, for $12 Billion before he was replaced by Meg Whitman.
One CMO sums it up simply, "The perfect solution is to serve each consumer individually. The problem? There are 7 billion of them,".
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