Thought Leadership and Social Media

As a follow-up to our blog published on 29 July, we thought it would be useful to share the findings of a report on ‘How Consulting Firms are Using Social Media to Market Their Ideas’ created by the Bloom Group, BlissPR and the Association of Management Consulting Firms (AMCF).

Though social media is considered to be ‘untamed’, the increasing number of entities using this medium to augment their brand building strategies, necessitates the spread of proper knowledge on this subject. I thought it would be interesting to share some key findings of this report with our readers.

• Consulting firms are quickly expanding their budgets to accommodate social media. While social media represented only an estimated 5 percent of the thought leadership marketing budget five years ago, spending has climbed rapidly in the last five years to an estimated 18 percent today. Five years from now, social media is projected to be about one-third of the marketing budget – about the same amount as consultancies will spend on offline and ’traditional’ online thought leadership marketing programmes.
• Social media will increasingly complement traditional thought leadership marketing channels. The two most effective thought leadership marketing activities are still ’offline’: seminars run by consultancies and speeches they give at conferences organized by third parties. However, company micro-sites or online communities, a relatively new social media channel, are close behind, ranked third in effectiveness (tied with search engine optimization.)
• Other social media tools are gaining on traditional techniques. For instance, company pages on social networking sites and participation in third-party social networks already surpass white paper syndication sites – an old staple of content marketing – in effectiveness.
• Falling short of content and determining how to use it as a marketing tool are the two biggest concerns about social media
• The consulting firms with the most effective thought leadership marketing programmes are much more likely to use research-based content, and they reportedly invest much more in social media than consulting firms with the least effective programmes. The ‘leaders’ of thought leadership marketing (firms generating more than 30 leads per month) are more than twice as likely as the ’laggards’ (firms generating 10 or less leads per month) to develop research-based content. In addition, the leaders dedicate three times the proportion of their budgets to social media than do the laggards. However, the leaders still apportion more than three-quarters (77 percent) of their budgets to offline and traditional online marketing.

 

Although the 2010 figures are not very promising for social media, the next five years are expected to steer its growth. Some interesting signs suggesting that consulting firms are in the early stages of using social media to market their ideas are:

• Only 31 percent have company-sponsored blogs.
• Less than half (48 percent) post comments on the blogs of influential parties outside the firm (e.g., professional bloggers).
• A little more than half (55 percent) use social networking message services such as Twitter to communicate their expertise and direct their followers to websites where they have published their ideas.