A LACK OF EXPERTISE IN SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNICATIONS STILL PREVALENT
Whilst more marketing and communications professionals are embracing social media channels for UK brands than last year, the 2010 McCann Erickson Social Media Index still shows that many agencies and consultants are not providing enough guidance to their clients on social media.
Almost half of those surveyed (48%) said they still don’t feel they have adequate knowledge on how best to use social media channels effectively for marketing purposes. Although this is down by over 16% from 64% last year the figure is still surprisingly high.
Nearly a quarter of respondents (23.4%) admitted that advances in social media are difficult to keep up with and almost the same proportion (22.4%) said they would like to understand social media more but that it is not easy to find genuine ‘experts’ in the field.
Interestingly, in just 12 months since the last survey there has been a marked increase in general social media usage for communications activities. On average, usage for each of the main social networks (facebook, twitter and LinkedIn) is up by around 22% from last year. Twitter has shown the most increased usage (+28.2% since 2009) with 61% of those surveyed now saying that Twitter is regularly used as a way of distributing news stories.
It seems that IT departments are now more willing to let their marketing teams have access to social networks at work. Last year’s results showed that 46% of respondents were unable to get access at work and although this figure has come down to 24.3% it still shows that nearly a quarter of UK marketers and communications practitioners are not granted workplace access to social networks, making monitoring and campaign execution impossible.
Social media monitoring for brands is now a key area for marketers who need to demonstrate effectiveness of activity, ROI and target audience usage of social networks. By far the most popular way of brand monitoring online is through Google Alerts with 45.5% using this free tool. Radian 6 has emerged as the most widely used paid-for tool with 14.3% usage followed by PR Newswire’s monitoring tool Social Media Metrics at 10.4%. 11% of those surveyed said they relied on their retained PR agency to monitor social media brand activity and 37% said they conducted ‘ad hoc’ monitoring in house.

Asked where they think the responsibility for social media communications should reside, 50% said it came under a combination of disciplines; 23% said it was best managed by public relations professionals and 11% said it should sit with digital experts.
Commenting on the study, Joanna Randall, head of PR and social media communications at McCann Erickson Bristol, which conducted the survey said: “Some of these results are very encouraging; there is clearly an upward trend in overall usage of social media as a marketing communications channel. However, we would still like to see some of the barriers removed for UK marketers, particularly, where access is blocked at work and there is a clear need for more information and training specifically targeted to marketers.”
McCann Erickson Bristol’s dedicated social media team called ‘SoMe’ is currently working with a range of clients providing social media comms strategies, reliable monitoring and reporting packages using a combination of services, social media audits and social media campaigns for solus and integrated clients across both consumer and B2B sectors.

Additional results at a glance:
• 59.8% respondents said that social media communications is now part of their day jobs
• 29% think there are now too many social media networks
• 12.1% think social media networks are becoming too commercial
• 16.8% said they are interested in using social media more within their daily role but do not
currently use it
For more information contact: joanna.randall@europe.mccann.com 0117 921 1764