By Pat McCarthy, Social Media Coordinator/Blog Editor, WOMMA
Jeremiah Owyang, Partner at Altimeter Group, published an analysis of how global brands can manage their increasing number of social media accounts. For the analysis, he surveyed 144 enterprise-class* corporations and 32 vendors. In addition, qualitative interviews were conducted with “71 industry experts, brands, and vendors.”
The Findings – An Uncontrollable Risk
Just a few years ago, major brands were debating if and how they should be involved in social media. It appears many of them decided to delve right in. These enterprise-class averaged 178 social media accounts! That doesn’t even include employee accounts. Furthermore, many didn’t even have an accurate inventory of their own accounts.
Numbers like these made me think about WOMMA’s social media. By my count we have:
- 1 Main Twitter account (@WOMMA)
- 4 Blogs
- 2 LinkedIn groups
- 1 Member community
- 1 YouTube account
- 1 Foursquare location
- 1 Flickr account
- 1 Slideshare account
- 1 Plancast account
- 1 Delicious account
That’s thirteen. About two for every one employee. I can certainly see how a company in multiple countries with thousands of employees could average 178.
What’s to Do?
Managing nearly 200 social media accounts is a CRM nightmare. Altimeter found that just over half of the vendors surveyed had integrated CRM with brand monitoring systems. Despite this, Advanced corporations shelled out an average of $272,000 on custom integration of their social tools and CRM systems.
Providing a coordinated customer experience is nearly impossible. From the report:
“Elizabeth Rizzo of PR agency SHIFT Communications told us, ‘When publishing through these platforms you can’t stay on top of all these messages and can’t tell what’s been responded to.’ The result, according to Ken Burbury of Digitas, is ‘a huge risk in brand reputation or reputation management.’”
Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) to the Rescue!
Like any superhero, no SMMS provider is perfect. One brand that Jeremiah interviewed stated:
“Every single [SMMS] tool is lacking a robust analytics package… You’re forced to use hybrid solutions.”
SMMS Growth
The SMMS market is ripe for growth. In fact, wheelbarrows of investment are flowing into SMMS startups. Altimeter Group found that private financing and angel investment range in the low six figures with Series A ranging from $1-3 million.
The Market Rundown
The crowded and nascent market can lead to a lot of buyer confusion. Included in the report was the below figure which examines the strengths and weaknesses of SMMS companies.
Click image for full size.
For the full report on the SMMS market, visit Jeremiah’s blog – Web Strategy.
*Enterprise-class defined as companies with over 1000 employees as of Q2 2011.
