8 out of 10 CMO’s to increase social media use in 3-5 years

And nearly 1,700 chief marketing offers believe that the digital media era is evolving the field.

IBM’s new study reveals that more than 1,700 chief marketing officers from 64 countries and 19 industries believe there is a critical and permanent shift occurring in the way they engage with their customers. However, they question whether their marketing organizations are prepared to manage the change.

The research also shows that measures used to evaluate marketing are evolving. About two-thirds of CMOs believe that return on marketing investment will be the main determinant of the marketing segment’s effectiveness by 2015. However, even among the top enterprises, almost half of CMOs feel they are not prepared to deliver such hard numbers.

And most of these executives say they aren’t as influential enough in important areas such as product development, pricing and selection of sales channels.

According to IBM’s study, 82% of CMOs plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years. Of these, only 26% are currently tracking blogs, 42% are tracking third party reviews and 48% are tracking consumer reviews to help hone their marketing skills.

"The inflection point created by social media represents a permanent change in the nature of customer relationships," said Carolyn Heller Baird, CRM research lead for the IBM Institute for Business Value and the global director of the study. "Approximately 90 percent of all the real-time information being created today is unstructured data. CMOs who successfully harness this new source of insight will be in a strong position to increase revenues, reinvent their customer relationships and build new brand value."