CorpComms Magazine

The majority of chief marketing professionals are planning to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years, says a new survey.

According to the 2011 IBM Global Chief Marketing Officer Study, eight out of ten plan to engage more in social media activity over the next three to five years. Just one quarter currently track blogs, while more than 40 per cent track third party reviews and almost half track consumer reviews. The respondents said they monitor these channels in order to help adapt their marketing strategy.

Carolyn Heller Baird, CRM research lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value, said: 'The inflection point created by social media represents a permanent change in the nature of customer relationships.'

Even though the participants recognised the need for change in order to meet new challenges, less than one third thought that technological competence was importance in terms of future success, and a quarter believed the same about social media.

Many of those asked also suffered from a lack of sophisticated analytics to measure performance effectively.

The study involved face-to-face meetings with more than 1,700 marketing professionals in 19 different industries, accross 64 countries around the world.

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