Social Media and Branding

Key findings from a survey of Society for Marketing Professional Services members (from design and contracting firms) found that:

• Individuals who use social networking face confusion both about how to use the tools and how to measure success.
• Respondents confused electronic social networking with going to conferences or other offline networking events.
• Media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter were being used primarily for marketing individual professionals (62%), firms (50%), and employee recruitment (20%).

Significantly, the sponsors found that, “Our study is already out of date,” due to the rate of growth of social media.

The following example, cited by ENR, indicates that some in the construction industry have already made a significant commitment to social media. HOK is on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious and VisualCV, and has four corporate communications staffers managing its social media sites plus 30 staff worldwide blogging on hoklife.com. A spokesman for the firm says social media already has helped HOK win some business.