Bucking Perceptions; Mid-Level Marketing and the Fortune 500

Facebook, Twitter and exploratory social media campaigns have become ubiquitous in the marketing departments of the service industry, as well as most retailers and their vertically integrated partners. There is a Facebook icon on every bag of Lays potato chips. You will rarely interact with a company without getting reminded to visit them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. All the news agencies, all restaurants, the majority of celebrity professionals and hoards of others have already embraced social media. When I hear someone insinuate that there are lots of hold outs, I can’t help but think they missed the boat themselves.

Marketing firms who worked on JC Penny print ads in the 1980s embraced technology just as much as every other industry in the 1990s. Some social media bloggers aren’t even aware of what the larger firms are doing, or even the strategies of mid-sized firms who will begin bombarding them with offers and blogger outreach programs once their blogs reach decent levels of traffic and engagement.  I was ecstatic last week after receiving a pair of offers to place small marketing devices on this blog. I didn’t expect to be tapped for that type of opportunity so early on, but it told me that I’m doing something right. (I declined both offers sadly, but usually where there is smoke there’s fire, and I expect to receive more in the months to come.)

In the early 2000s boutique marketing firms that specialized in online communications started to pop up, and full service marketing firms were quick to copy and expand on their ideas. Before the bottom fell out of the economy there was an explosion of investment and research in the ways companies could better serve their customers through technology. As the economy started to slide, smaller business started to look to the World Wide Web for expansion and a means to keep their businesses from going under.

One segment of the corporate world that has baffled online marketing researchers has been the Fortune 500.  In 2008, the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth compiled the first study regarding the use of Social Media by Fortune 500 companies that year. There are several factors that made the results difficult to interpret, and have allowed some journalists to spin the evidence in whichever way they feel like social media adoption rates should be trending.

The problems with the Fortune 500 as a control group are numerous. The most obvious being that not all Fortune 500 companies deal directly with the public, and therefor do not have an imminent need to invest in the space. Given the fact that much of the Fortune 500 is composed of conglomerates that own subsidiary companies, a study focusing on the primary corporations miss heavy social media use in sectors where there is a need for a high level of public interaction. Finally, there is evidence of many Fortune 500 companies who use blogging and other social media internally as a means to engage employees. Since the students researching this study could not get access to internal systems, only public facing social media was included.

Nevertheless, the numbers produced by the U-Mass study were relatively low, especially when compared to other institutions like Higher Education, Non-Profits, and other indices. In 2011 there were three companies in the top five without public facing blogs; Chevron, Conoco Philips, and Fannie Mae. All of these companies have a buffer between themselves and the public at large when doing business. They are also similar in the fact that they represent special interests and the government’s interference in private enterprise, both of which make negative perceptions hard to combat. Just as I wouldn’t recommend Casey Anthony to start a public relations campaign driven by social media, keeping a low profile is often the best course of action for entities that face an insurmountable negative perception. There will be organic turning points that their PR can take advantage of over time, so it pays to have an infrastructure in place to reach social media channels.

An intranet style network is a valuable means of making sure employees have a common reference for customer inquiries, and promotes the sharing of ideas. It makes sense for a company like Boeing, who isn’t going to sell 747s on the mass market anytime soon to use this technology as a means to benefit their employees. While an adequate public social media infrastructure would take little investment for a household name like Boeing, campaigns directed at consumers are not befitting their business model. The stagnant growth rates are isolated to certain industries. Industries that are by no means shy of technology, and may be using networking or other social media tools in an internal capacity.

While some analysts report that the U-Mass study shows the Fortune 500 lacking in social media, others say it shows tremendous growth and an already stable investment in social media networks and tools. Forbes says corporations are giving up on social media while reporters for the Social Times say the study shows that social media use is exploding. Trying to reconcile these conclusions is pointless. Forbes was focused on growth and paid particular attention to public-facing blogs as an indicator of social media presence. The Social Times focused on overall saturation and was more concerned with Facebook pages and Twitter profiles. In 2010 44 percent of Fortune 500 businesses thought that Facebook was the singular most important social media tool. 71 percent of companies have a Facebook Fan Page, and 59 percent had a corporate Twitter account. I strongly suggest looking at the study yourself and drawing your own conclusions.

The stat that tells me a lot about the stagnation and unimpressive integration among the Fortune 500 is that only 34 percent of companies have drawn up policies to govern blogging by their employees. Fortune 500 companies have the resources to institute widespread education and strategies like the Social Swarm. The employees should be brand ambassadors, and the social media channels should be more than another contact form nobody hardly cares about; they should be a hub for discussion related to the brand and a portal for customers to get more information about the products they already own, products they may buy, and the people who become the face of the brand in a social media setting.