Companies are still struggling to achieve good ROI from social technologies, according to a newly released survey conducted by Teradata Aster, Mzinga and The Center for Complexity in Business at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. School of Business.
The study of more than 500 participants from a wide variety of professional disciplines and industries found that while the majority of businesses use social technologies, they can achieve greater ROI by developing customer and marketing strategies to target trust and influence in their business.
Nearly half (49 percent of the survey respondents said they are not using social technologies to their full potential, while only 12 percent said that social technologies are helping in their daily roles and responsibilities.
According to the researchers, the top areas where social technologies can help with trust and influence are customer experience, service and support; marketing and brand experience; employee collaboration and knowledge sharing; and sales.
The researchers added that while firms are placing a greater emphasis on the impact of social technologies, professionals are having difficulty understanding analytics and how to measure ROI. Three-quarters of survey respondents said they do not measure ROI for their social business programs. Most of the use is on a case-by-case basis.
Furthermore, of those who do not measure ROI, nearly one in three (31 percent) don’t know if their vendor provides analytics, while 14 percent have a vendor who does not provide analytics. Nearly half (44 percent) do not work with any vendor for analytics. Some of the platforms that respondents use provide analytics, and others do not. To fill the gaps, many respondents said they use their own tools for analytics, or use ones from social networks, such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.
According to the survey: “Many participants claimed to be influential in their company’s adoption of social technologies, but were unaware of how their use could be successfully measured, or stated that analytics were too difficult. Those successfully measuring ROI examine a large number of metrics, including churn rates, effectiveness of messaging, business process proficiency, customer engagement, lead generation, share of word of mouth and many more.”
The researchers said that firms can achieve greater accuracy, insight and performance through better use of social technologies. Though respondents said they realize the importance of analyzing and gaining insights from social interactions in real time, most were unable to say when they could implement a solution to do so.
The use of big data is still beyond the abilities of many of the respondents, according to the survey. Forty-two percent of respondents said that they were unaware of big data technologies. Respondents indicated that the top metrics they want to derive out of big data are customer feedback and preferences; user, behavioral and content trend analysis; and ROI.
The top uses for social technology today include (multiple responses were given): Marketing or brand experience, 64 percent; customer experience, service or support, 47 percent; employee collaboration and/or knowledge sharing, 39 percent; and sales, 27 percent.