This week’s Social Media Stat of the Week comes to us courtesy of eMarketer and Satmetrix. In a survey of 1,000 B2B and B2C companies, 47% of B2B companies did not track or follow up on brand mentions on social media at all.

That means nearly half of B2B companies are either using the push method of content delivery (and not listening), or are ignoring social as a viable marketing channel all together. I was shocked that the number was so high.

For the 53% of B2B companies that do follow and track social mentions, 56% count only the comments and followers. That’s the extent of their social media measurement – counting comments and followers. Wow.

Do either of these stats surprise you? Are these numbers worrisome?

If you haven’t subscribed to the Social Pros podcast already, check it out at Convince and Convert or find us on iTunes!

For the stat of the week, we took a close look at some Q1 data from Facebook. The data comes from TBG Digital, a major seller and manager of Facebook advertising campaigns. The company based its findings on a sample of 327 billion ad impressions from 235 Facebook advertising clients:

• CPM rates are up 41%. The study cuts this data point – and most others – by geography. The US and the UK have seen the biggest rate increases over the past 3 months.
• CPC rates are up 23%. User growth is decelerating, but the site is becoming more attractive for advertisers – which creates supply/demand imbalance.
• Ad engagement is down. There are more ads on the page and – presumably – more first-time advertisers finding their way on Facebook.

I remember that rapid bid-up of Google Adwords that happened from 2003 to 2005…and I suppose never really stopped! So it isn’t a shock to see history repeat itself with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The question remains how quickly the bidding will accelerate – both in mainstream verticals and the local/longtail market.

The Social Media Stat of the Week comes courtesy of customer feedback management firm CFI Group, which conducts an annual Call Center Satisfaction Index.

The full-report is $500 and I’m a cheapskate, so we don’t have all of the details. But the press release headlines definitely warrant discussion:

• Shift to self-service: “In 2011, 27% of respondents had tried to resolve their issues elsewhere prior to resorting to working with the call center. The primary alternate channel was the web.”
• Post support experience socializaing: “What we are seeing is that, if you have a bad experience, you post it once on Facebook for all to see and then you’re done with it,” stated Terry Redding, director of development and delivery for CFI Group. “By the same token, we are seeing good experiences posted in the same way.”
• Volume drowns out the bad: “While a bad experience may increase the odds that someone will tell others, the sheer number of positive experiences and positive posts seems to be outweighing the negative word-of-mouth in volume.”

Somewhat related case-in-point: my Twitter audience has complained about every airline equally such that their complaints no longer register – let alone resonate. And the number of positive experiences – like in-flight wifi, first-class upgrades, etc. – nets out the complaints.

Social makes everything more transparent – the good and the bad. Should your community goal be to manufacture enough good to cover up the inevitable bad?

Fun Fact: Lauren made the connection between me and LoudMouth Golf, which resulted in my fantastic collection of Argyle pants. Listen to the episode for the full story…

This week’s Social Media Stat of the Week comes from BRANDfog – a social strategy agency based in NYC. The agency recently released its 2012 CEO, Social Media, and Leadership Survey.

To me, these are the key nuggets:

• 86% of the people surveyed rated CEO social media engagement as somewhat important, very important or mission-critical.
• 81% of the people surveyed believe that CEOs who engage in social media are better equipped to successfully lead a company in a web 2.0 world.

Trust and transparency are the name of the game – stakeholders want it and social media provides the mechanism to make it happen.

The methodology is fairly loose:

The company surveyed several hundred employees of diverse companies, spanning in size from startups to Fortune 500 companies, and working at all levels of their respective organizations. Respondents representing a wide selection of industries, professions and regions were asked to answer questions pertaining to social media participation by their organization and executive leadership team.

…so I’m left to question who exactly is the CEO in the question. Depending on company size and industry, the role of the social media CEO could be quite diverse.

The document is pretty meaty and the visualizations are fantastic – so it is definitely worth reading in more detail.

Chris is the only person I know that can weave social media marketing, ninjutsu, and Bureau of Labor Statistics into the same conversation – so you know that this is a great episode.

This week’s Social Media Stat of the Week comes from a February 2012 survey of B2B marketing and agency professionals by BtoB Magazine. You can read a summary of the report at eMarketer.com.

Here are some of nuggets from the report that we discussed in this week’s podcast:

• 59% of the survey participants view lead generation as their greatest online marketing challenge. B2B marketing is all about lead gen, so you gotta wonder what the other 41% of the marketers are worrying about. The summary report doesn’t list the other options – presumably they’re all leading indicators of the lead gen challenge?
• 57% said email marketing was the online channel that contributed the most qualified leads to their businesses. 13% said that social media was their biggest driver of leads, which was surprising to me – I would have guessed social .
• Only 5% of respondents described their social media efforts as “well-optimized,” compared with 30% who felt that way about their email programs – a reasonable number for social…and an appalling number for email considering it has been around for about 25 years now. Maybe only 30% of the market is capable of “well-optimizing” a channel? Or maybe only 30% care enough to do so?

The Social Media Stat of the Week isn’t a single number, but instead the swirling data points that collectively make up Facebook Insights.

Over the past few months, Facebook has introduced the “People Talking About This” and “Engaged Users” metrics – which the market is still struggling to understand – and deprecated meaningful metrics like the aggregate number of daily comments and likes made per page and per post.

And all of this happened around the same time that Facebook released massive changes to its advertising platform that organic and paid social programs. Over the coming months, social media marketers will find themselves accountable for ad budgets and will quickly need to understand how the numbers shake out to justify campaigns and spend.

It seems like Facebook is asking for more of your advertising budget and simultaneously complicating the process by which you’ll measure the performance of said budget.

Jay authored a great post about Facebook that interprets the tea leaves in such a way that indicates a new “engagement-centric” Facebook that’s less about outcomes and more about a “touchy, feely” ethos.

In short, the myriad Facebook Insights have never been more important…and they’ve never been more confusing.

This episodes stat of the week comes from my friend Tom Webster, the VP of Marketing at renowned market research firm Edison Research. Tom writes an amazing blog at Brand Savant that I highly recommend. And he recently added to his sprawling media empire with the launch of DataSnob – a blog that Tom launched to examine the latest, hot new statistic about social media and separate the kernel of truth from the chaff of hyperbole.

Tom’s inaugural post on DataSnob examines a report and dataset published on Mashable via Shareaholic. The study makes the bold claim that Pinterest drives more traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google Plus combined…but does a poor job of reflecting the scope of the data.

From Tom:

While the study is fine as an indicator of the behavior of Shareaholic users, it is, let’s say, unclear that it’s a useful proxy for Internet behavior in general. None of this is to denigrate Shareaholic’s methodology – I take their data at face value. However, there are waaaaaay too many facts not in evidence here to draw many conclusions about this data beyond the scope of Shareaholic users. Chief among those facts: how representative are Shareaholic users of Internet users in general? Or social media users? Or even Pinterest users?

Enjoy Social Pros #7 – it’s a good one.

For this week’s Social Media Stat of the Week, we discussed the results of a 2011 B2B marketing survey by the Corporate Executive Board. It is an oldie, but a goodie.

The big takeaway from the survey is that – on average and with little variation among industries – customers independently complete about 60% of the purchasing decision process before they contacted a sales rep. In other words – by the time your rep is on the phone with a prospect, the prospect is over halfway done with their buying process.

When you consider where a prospect might be hanging out online during that 60% of the process, there are a few obvious B2B social media marketing implications. Are your social investments calibrated with the buying process in mind? Are you enabling your existing customers such that they’ll do your marketing on your behalf?

This data nugget suggests a massive void in the middle of the marketing funnel. Social is filling this void with or without you.

For this week’s Social Media Stat of the Week, we discussed the findings from a recent social commerce study commissioned by Digitas, executed by Harris Interactive.

Social commerce appears to be the next great Internet gold rush – Booz & Co estimates that social commerce will grow to a $30B global industry over the next five years. But our research at Argyle, plus this survey via Digitas/Harris…plus a 2-minute conversation with your average Facebook user…paints a very different picture.

Harris Interactive surveyed 2,630 U.S. adults aged 18 years and older, of which 2,247 were identified as a social media user. Some key nuggets and thoughts are below:

55% of the sample stated that they are “uncomfortable” providing their credit card information via social media sites. You’ve gotta think that Facebook’s checkered past with regards to user data and privacy shapes this concern. I’d like to know how many of these “uncomfortable” people are otherwise okay conducting transactions on trusted sites like Amazon.com.

74% say that they would not use alternative currencies such as Facebook Credits or Bitcoin to conduct transactions on social media sites. If over half are uncomfortable providing their credit card information and 3/4 are not interested in alternative currencies, does this mean we’re left with cashier’s checks? I’d be interested to see how these two payment stats overlap.

One in five social media users agree that, where possible, they would purchase products or services from their favorite brands on a social media site. Note that this isn’t “One in five made a purchase…” – it is “One in five agree that they would make a purchase…” Unless I’m reading too much into this question, I’m not sure that this reflects the surging social commerce tidal wave that many perceive.

I found this survey useful, though there is obviously a much bigger story to tell. I’m bullish on social commerce – we’ll continue to track it closely on the Social Pros Podcast.

Want more social commerce insights? Argyle is co-producing a social commerce webcast with ChannelAdvisor later this month. Register early before we fill it up!

As a part of the program, Jay and I discuss the “Social Media Stat of the Week” – a recurring segment we’ve set up to evaluate and ratify/debunk a single data point from the swirling cacophony of social media “data”.

We’ll discuss these stats on the Argyle blog going forward. Since we’re a couple episodes behind, here are snapshots from Episode #1 and Episode #2.

In Episode 1 with Taulbee Jackson from Radious, we discussed the Edelman Trust Barometer. In 2011, 50% of the people surveyed stated that information coming from the CEO of an organization would be deemed extremely or very credible. In 2012, only 38% of the people deemed information from the CEO as extremely or very credible. This dramatic change is one of several in the document illustrating that trust in institutions and institutional leaders is on the down, and trust in your peers and regular employees in organizations is on the up. I highly recommend a close reading of the report – there are meaningful business implications in understanding the public hive mind.

In Episode 2 with Scott Monty from Ford Motor Company, we highlighted some of our own research from Argyle. We aggregated publicly available information from the Internet Retailer 500 and dug up quite a few insights, one of which is that 91% of the IR500 uses free or cheap social media management systems – meaning marketing offerings priced at $50 per month or less. We found it surprising that so many of the most sophisticated retailers in the world are using the same marketing tools as Mom & Pop shops.

If you’re interested in more social commerce data and best practices, then you’ll definitely want to register for Argyle’s Feb 23 webcast with Channel Advisor. We’ll discuss the marketing tools and marketing practices of the IR500 in MUCH more detail with Link Walls, VP of Product at Channel Advisor.