Worldwide Study Shows Global Business Anti-Social in a Social Media Age

    Almost half of companies fail to track social media

    Over half of companies have no way to respond to customers on social media

    B2B desperately lagging behind B2C in social media adoption with 75% not measuring social media

London, May 17, 2012 - New worldwide research published today by Satmetrix®, the Net Promoter® software company, highlights that the majority of organisations of all sizes across B2C and B2B are blind to the opportunities and threats of social media.

Highlights of the Satmetrix worldwide social media study include:

    Businesses are blind to the threats and opportunities of social media
        39% have no social media tracking in place at all

        51% of B2B have no tracking compared to 22% of B2C companies surveyed

    55% of companies ignore customers who provide feedback via social media - by having no process in place to respond
        This increases to 69% for B2B companies compared to 42% for B2C

    67% of companies do not measure or quantify social media - increasing to 75% for B2B companies
        For those that do have some form of quantification, 56% just count the comments and followers

        Only 4% have any form of sentiment analysis

    60% of businesses do not have an integrated social media strategy (either do nothing, track or follow up only)

    North America leads the way with 43% of North American companies having a follow up process compared to about 25% in other regions

“Businesses recognise the need for a social media strategy, however many are challenged in putting an effective strategy in place,” said Richard Owen, chief executive officer, Satmetrix. “Whilst 77% of consumers post about products, 67% of businesses have no means of measuring what is being said and less than one in 20 have any insight into the sentiment of what is being said. This is both a huge threat and a massive lost opportunity. Not only are companies running the risk of losing customers by not addressing their issues shared online but they are also walking past the opportunity to capitalise on positive comments made on the social web.”

“SparkScore™, our breakthrough social media Net Promoter Score and subsequent software solutions will change the game,” continued Owens. “It enables companies to understand and act on the sentiment of content shared online. It will empower companies to harness the power of social media.”

Earlier this year, Satmetrix announced it will change the way businesses measure and use social media with the first-ever Net Promoter social media measurement solution, Satmetrix® SparkScore™. The solution applies the same NPS® methodology of recommendation behaviour, which identifies detractors, passives and promoters of a brand, to social media sentiment. With SparkScore, businesses will be able to measure the fluid and unstructured comments and opinions made about their brands online using Net Promoter, the widely-embraced customer loyalty metric and business practice that drives profitable growth.

In the upcoming weeks and months, Satmetrix will be releasing a series of SparkScore solutions. The first, free edition, is currently live in beta version and a limited number of invited customers have been given access. It is scheduled to launch at the Net Promoter Conference in London in June and will measure SparkScores of major brands across select industries. Using Metavana’s rigorous and reliable sentiment engine, SparkScore will analyse the fluid and unstructured comments made about brands across social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, and more), as well as reviews discussion sites and applicable private customer forums, and assign a SparkScore to each brand. Companies will be able to access their overall SparkScore and compare it to their industry’s benchmark and best and worst scores on a weekly basis.

Following this first release, Satmetrix will be embedding its SparkScore solutions into its Net Promoter in the Cloud software applications to enable companies to generate more powerful social media insights and drive action across their organisations to increase business results.

For media wishing to arrange an early look at the free SparkScore site before global launch in June, please contact Matt Manners. Details below.

The research was carried out in January 2012 with community members of http://www.netpromoter.com/. The results are based on 1180 responses from businesses around the globe.