There have been endless arguments on the effectiveness of the new wave of interactive marketing. Many educated consumers and marketers are convinced that conversations between customers and business are the future of marketing. We, the bloggers of ExponentialWeb, conducted an online poll – just to see what the people out there are really thinking. We focused less on the technologies being used, but more on the concept of social media marketing and how people feel about open and interactive communication between customers and companies.

Within the three days during which the poll was open, we got a total of 131 respondents. It is noteworthy that since we got these largely through our own connections, there is some bias in the sample of this poll (as with all polls). Most respondents were most likely Generation Y students, pursuing either an undergraduate or graduate degree. Most were probably Internet and technology literate. They are all or nearly all facebook users, as facebook was the main vehicle through which we obtained respondents. However, most were probably not regular users of other social networking tools such as twitter.

We asked the following five questions and obtained the following results, which we will comment upon later:

Question 1 – Single choice

Question 2 – Single choice

Question 3 – Single choice

Question 4 – Single choice

Question 5 – Multiple choice

One of the trademarks of social media is the increased ability for customers and companies to directly communicate. About half of our respondents found it ’somewhat important’ to communicate with companies whose products they liked. Only 16% found it ‘very important’, while 26% saw it as outright ‘unimportant’. There are several ways of interacting with companies through social media. Communication with companies, especially when it’s a two-way conversation, can lead to beneficial interactions in which both customers and companies learn about the needs, desires, and abilities of each other.

The fact that more people did not find it even more important to communicate could be an indication either of concerns about interactive communication, or of doubt over the effectiveness of such methods. This is reflected by the fact that the majority of respondents were concerned about privacy issues and the effectiveness of interactive communicative methods, as per question 5. One key factor that is harder to measure is the fact that even our educated and Internet savvy sector of the population is still not used to this form of communication! They are still using more primitive methods, although newer and more effective ones are available to them.

One promising result in terms of the benefits of social media is that most people at least saw a company’s openness towards customer communication as positive. Social media is a crucial vehicle for companies to come out in the open and communicate openly. Whether through facebook groups and pages, twitter, or blogs, the number of companies communicating in an interactive arena has increased. If people are seeing this as a good thing, then it will put pressure on companies to enter this arena.

A classic paradigm in the field of psychology dictates that people will be more willing to express feedback if it is negative. We wanted to test this paradigm on public interactive venues. While our results from questions 3 and 4 do show that the old paradigm remains true, the results are give more insight than just this. Although about half of respondents would update their facebook status to express positive feedback on a product or service, more than half of these people would prefer that this update be visible only to their friends. In other words, for some reason, people did not want their feedback getting out to the company or its potential customers. This could be attributed to the aforementioned privacy concerns with this kind of exposure, as well as with the fact that in our culture people are not yet accustomed this this kind of open interactive communication.

In line with the old paradigm, 64% of respondants said they would prefer to express their negative feedback in an open interactive venue, rather than in a private venue such as an email or a phone call. This indicates that customers recognize the benefits of public communication at some level. They realize that saying some things out in the open can lead to positive interactions between them and other customers or the company, or at least spread the word of their complaint more effectively. Companies should take this is a cue not only to listen to customers who communicate through this venue, but to interact with them and react to their concerns.

It is interesting that while our respondents saw openness to customer communication as a positive trait in a company, not many of them found it ‘very important’ to communicate with them. If we were to conduct this same survey several years from, the main change would probably be an increase in this statistic.

The fact that the use of interactive communicative methods and tools has exploded over the past several years has not only been a result of clever uses in technology. The means to create interactive communicative platforms existed years before the rise of these tools. Their use, however, resulted from a need for people to make increasingly complex choices. We are bombarded with information every day, but we need a way to filter out the useful stuff from everything else. With all the products out there, we want a way to find out which one is just right for us.

Like all significant changes, it will takes our culture time to adapt to all this. We think it’s worth the wait.

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P.S. If you want to give us more data, feel free to take our survey =).

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