Survey: What Do Indian Marketeers Think about Social Media

Exchange4media.com and Blogworks conducted a survey of 267 people, comprising of working professionals, executives and business leaders in December 2008 & January 2009, regarding certain perceptions related to Social Media. Some of the key insights from the report are:

• For nearly 90% of marketers Buzz and Word of Mouth are top deliverables from Social Media.
• Again nearly 65% of respondents think that Social Media can deliver insights
• The top metrix for measuring the success of social media program was increase in brand awareness which is followed by amount of user generated content
• Most Commonly used Social Media techniques was to build a presence on social networking sites, YouTube, Flickr and start a company blog
• 81-85 percent of respondents believe that Indian marketers and corporates have just cursory or no understanding of SM, the need for education and learning continues to remain big
• Only 25 percent of respondents are currently spending over 10% of their marketing budget on SM. However, 43 percent of respondents feel that they would be spending 10% or more of their marketing budget in the next two years
• Sectors using blogs and social media platforms in the best way possible: IT, Telecom, Airlines, Bollywood Movies and actors, Job Portals
• Brands with the highest recall with respect to social media: Sunsilk: Gang-of-Girls, Tata Tea : Jaago Re,MTV Roadies,Fastrack, Pepsi (Youngistan campaign) ,Blogs of Microsoft, IBM, HP, Nokia, Blogs of Amitabh Bachchan and Aamir Khan

Social media Marketing is a high potential but largely untested field and everyone here is still learning in this field and so a survey like this does throws up some interesting knowledge. One thing is clear from this survey unlike other forms of Internet advertising social media is not seen as performance based advertising but an engagement tool and a lot of marketeers are thinking about how to use it.If the number of PR guys who keep pitching their company activities to me are any indication than blogs are being taken very seriously by a lot of companies but is social media marketing effective that's a tough question since you can have lots of contrasting view point in this field as was made by this research which said that social media was ineffective so lets wait and see how this field evolves.