Senior marketing execs see their companies moving to social media in 2010

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MENG has just released the results of its third annual Marketing Trends study (which you can view here), and the results showed that senior-level marketers and execs are getting very serious about social media.

First, some background on MENG and the respondents to this study. All MENG members must have attained a level of VP or higher prior to joining, and must have a salary of at least $160K. So these findings are coming from people that are in a position to shape the marketing initiatives in their companies.

BTW complete disclosure, I was recently selected to MENG's Social Media Council of Advisors, along with friends and smarties Drew McClellan, Beth Harte, Amber Naslund, Paul Dunay and Joe Pulizzi.

Now, for the key social media findings, which come from roughly 1,800 MENG members.

• Over 70% of respondents said their company is planning NEW social media initiatives in 2010

• 43% of respondents said their company had a Facebook presence, 43% said their company had a LinkedIn presence, and 34% said their company was on Twitter. 28% of respondents said their company had a blog, and this was noted as being significantly higher than last year's findings.

• As for which social sites MENG members are using themselves, LinkedIn was the big winner here, with 92% of respondents saying they use LI, Facebook was second with 56%.

• Companies are more likely to maintain a blog than individual executives, and executives are less likely to have a personal blog UNLESS they are at a smaller company (less than 2,000 employees).

• As for implementing new social media initiatives in 2010, most execs surveyed will do so internally (71%). 28% said they would rely on interactive agencies, 25% on social media consultants, 20% on PR agencies, and 16% on ad agencies.

• As far as creating social media strategies, both large companies (46%) and small companies (41%) will be going with social media consultants as their top choice if they outsource. Next will be interactive, PR and Ad agencies.

• Larger companies that outsource social media initiatives will turn to Interactive agencies (33%), Ad agencies (31%), PR agencies (26%) and Social Media Consultants (24%)

• What criteria do companies have to who they outsource their social media initiatives to? The top 4 answers were Examples of Previous Work (94%), Recommendations (91%), Quality of Response to RFP (82%), and Cost (80%). Interestingly, the 11th most popular determinant was Social Media Certification (32%) and 12th was Number of Twitter Followers (21%).

I think this study also shows that marketers are becoming a bit tired of the buzz around social media. Mark left a comment in the previous post about how we 'pundits' told companies that they had to start using social media. He's right, and they did, and now they realize they aren't sure how to evaluate their efforts. So I think that's where a lot of the frustration is coming from, but as they become more adept at social media and how the tools function, that frustration should decrease.

If you want to see the results (PowerPoint) for yourself, you can view them here.