Between January and February of 2009 The Aberdeen Group examined social media usage, experiences, and intentions of over 275 diverse enterprises. They published their findings in a free (with registration) report, entitled:
The ROI on Social Media Marketing
Why it Pays to Drive Word of Mouth
The goal was to create a roadmap to help companies leverage social media and word of mouth to drive overall marketing improvement. The study classifies participants into three groups, based on their business/marketing practices with respect to social media:
- Best-In-Class: Practices that are best being employed and are significantly superior to Industry Average, and result in top industry performance.
- Industry Average: Practices that represent the average or norm, and result in average industry performance.
- Laggards: Practices that are significantly behind the average of the industry, and result in below average performance.
There are clear and remarkable performance improvements achieved by implementing best-in-class practices.
The report offers required actions to move from Laggard and Industry Average status to Best-In-Class and provides several case studies. This report is a must-read for any company questioning whether they should employ social media in their marketing initiatives, looking for help justifying social media marketing budget allocation, or hoping to improve their performance by identifying and executing best practices.