About a week ago Vocus announced the results of its annual PR planning survey, titled Social Media Comes of Age. Today, we’ve sliced that data exclusively for B2C Insider to look strictly at the data from respondents with a B2C focus.
Demographics
A total of 119 respondents out of 508 identified as focusing on the B2C space. Among these 119, 56% worked in public relations, 25% in marketing, and the rest were in SEO, advertising, and social media. Nearly a third of the respondents (29%) were executive-level professionals, such as a CMO or CEO, while 72% reported being at the director level or higher. Sixty-one percent said they worked for a corporation, while the remaining 39% were employed by an agency. The data shown in the charts in this post comes from these 119 respondents, and we used different colors in the charts to help avoid confusion.
B2C Budgets in 2011
Expectations for B2C PR budgets were slightly more optimistic than the surveys overall results. Forty-eight percent of B2C respondents said they expected budgets to “increase somewhat” or “increase significantly” in 2011 which represents a 6% difference when looking at all the responses, which tallied at 42%.
Sixty-two percent of B2C respondents believe that PR will be tougher next year, while 32% think the challenges will remain the same and six percent feel it will be easier. Although the outlook for PR budgets in B2C seems positive, the responses to the question about challenges next year highlighted budgets as a major worry.
“Decreased budgets and higher expectations from clients,” wrote one respondent. “Less money, crowded media environment,” said a second. “Expanding business needs to do more with same budget,” penned a third.
Social media a priority for B2C
Eighty-five percent of respondents see social media becoming more important in 2011, or 5% higher than overall survey respondents. We believe this is because consumer brands are seeing social media efforts having a positive effect on sales. After experimenting in 2010 and seeing success, consumer brands are will redouble their efforts to drive results in 2011.
Perhaps the most notable campaign of 2010 – and consumer brand experiment that went well – was the Old Spice campaign, which Brandweek reported boosted sales 55% in a three month period. It’s important to point out that by many measures the Old Spice campaign was an integrated campaign: it combined advertising with public relations and social media.
B2C professionals view their organizations as fairly sophisticated in the use of social media. Seventy-four percent rate themselves as either “contributing,” “sharing,” or “participating” vice 67% of overall respondents. Especially noteworthy is that 34% of B2C respondents gave themselves the highest mark, “contributing” as opposed to just 25% of overall respondents giving themselves the same grade.
As we wrote in the report analyzing the overall results, these responses are a testament that communications professionals and their brands understand the importance of participating, sharing and contributing in the social landscape. Although a smaller percentage of companies seemingly express apathy over participating in social media, most realize that social media is not a spectator sport. The days of getting cool points for merely being on Twitter are long gone.
Author: Frank Strong is the director of Public Relations for Vocus. Connect with him on Twitter @Vocus