Top Execs Dish About Social Media Strategy: From Marketing Daily/MediaPost

by Karlene Lukovitz

What do senior management executives at CPG companies and retailers think about corporate social media strategies?

Top executives were probed on this topic, along with many others, as part of the research for a just-released 2010 Grocery Manufacturers Association/PricewaterhouseCoopers financial performance report -- and the insights gleaned are more specific and practical than marketers might imagine.  Click here for entire article.  

This was the key takeaway for me:

More companies are hiring directors of digital media. For instance, McDonald's decided that it was time to have a person dedicated to these media 100% of the time, "rather than someone who's got a day job on top of a day job," said director of external communications/public relations Heather Oldani.

• Figure out the ROI. Social media are not free. Creating branded content and posting take time, and if a company chooses to apply resources to social media, it must in turn take resources out of its mass-media advertising budget, stressed Bush Brothers CFO Al Williams.

Del Monte measures ROI by focusing on metrics such as the engagement quality/ "richness" of posted comments and numbers of people clicking from its Facebook page to a brand's Web site, rather than raw fan counts, noted Chavez.

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Type A Parenting for the Modern World

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