Sally Falkow reports on a presentation by Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner:
75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies are eager to get involved in social-networking initiatives for marketing or customer relations purposes, but 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures, predicts Sarner. What are they doing wrong?
“(Businesses) will rush to the community and try to connect, but essentially they won’t have a mutual purpose, and they’ll fail,” Sarner said.
What does he mean by a “mutual purpose?” Any social media campaign has to be an authentic involvement with a community. A successful campaign will serve both the company putting out the campaign and the audience interacting with it and finding that balance is not easy
Gartner’s research shows that by 2012 fully half of all purchases will have some online component. That could mean searching for product reviews, reading about a new product on a blog, or comparing prices even if the purchase is ultimately made in a stor
