Do your marketing chiefs continue to doubt social media?

Take comfort—you’re not alone. A new IBM survey found that fewer than half of CMOs pay attention to social media. But don’t worry; help is on the way.

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I’ll be teaching my Social Media Boot Camp to a group of PR people when one of them will blurt out: “I get this, but you need to talk to my boss! He doesn’t believe in any of this, and I can’t get the budget.’

Sound familiar?

According to a recent IBM survey, 82 percent of chief marketing officers still rely on traditional market research to drive their campaigns. Only 26 percent pay any attention to blogs, and a mere 40 percent track other online communication such as Twitter and Facebook.

For PR professionals and internal communicators, the study must be comforting. It’s maddening to think that yours is the only PR department on Earth left stranded in the social media wilderness.

So, why is this the case?

The IBM report clearly identified one of the problems—too much data and not enough answers to the question, “What do I do with all these numbers?”

“The perfect solution is to serve each consumer individually,” said one of the 1,700 CMOs who responded to the survey. “The problem? There are 7 billion of them.”

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