The 2011 Irish Digital Marketing Sentiment Survey was recently conducted by AMAS in partnership with the Marketing Institute of Ireland (MII) (Good to see that MII have eventually realised that there is a digital world out there!).

Risks as well as opportunities exist in how social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube are used as marketing channels.

The study also reveals that marketing budgets continue to move online and that print advertising is losing out to advertising on a range of digital channels.

Attitudes to social media, both positive and negative, proved to be revealing. Social media is an established part of the marketing armoury and is used primarily for relationship building (84%), to create brand awareness (76%) and for listening to and monitoring online conversations about companies, brands and people (66%). Asked to consider the impact of social media, Irish marketers recognised benefits such as:

• The ability to understand audiences better (79%)
• Delivering cost savings to the business (46%)
• Providing the opportunity to make valuable connections (68%)

There is an acknowledgement, though, that social media can have downsides such as:

• Increasing a marketer’s workload (64%)
• Concerns about damage to a company’s reputation (51%)
• The challenges of keeping up to date with what is happening in social media (52%)
• A fear of making mistakes on social media sites that cannot be corrected (39%)

Full details of this survey are available at AMAS

Anthony Quigley