We are currently looking for German speaking interview partners from the Münster area for our latest social media research project. The 45 minutes personal interview will be on your experiences with social media activities from companies you like or follow. You receive a 20,-€ allowance for your time and help. If you are interested, please fill out our pre-questionnaire so we can evaluate if you are eligible for this interview. Your help is much appreciated! :-)
Wir suchen aktuell deutschsprachige Interviewpartner aus dem Raum Münster für unser neuestes Forschungsprojekt. Das ca. 45-minütige, persönliche Interview bespricht Deine persönlichen Erfahrungen mit den Social Media-Auftritten von Unternehmen, die Du magst und denen du folgst. Als kleines Dankeschön erhält jeder Interviewteilnehmer eine Aufwandsentschädigung von 20,-€. Falls Du interessiert sein solltest, fülle bitte unseren Vorabfragebogen aus, damit wir besser bewerten können, ob Du für ein Interview in Frage kommst. Bereits vorab vielen Dank für Deine Hilfe! :-)
we are very proud to present you our first German Social Media Report 2012 /2013.
The report analyzes the importance of social media for consumption and is representative for the German population. These are the key findings:
For social media, “infancy” is over! In 2012, social became mainstream and are now heavily used by all strata of the German population. No matter what age, educational background, or income, and no matter where in Germany they live, everyone uses social media.
The average Social Media Index, which measures social media usage intensity for German citizens is 7.5 (on our scale the daily use of a single social networks such as Facebook warrants 3 points).
The vast majority of Germans use social media several times a day.
Social networks vary significantly with regard to the people they attract. On average, Twitter users are the most active people, whereas Xing users are the wealthiest – and both networks have the highest educated users.
People have started to use social media to improve major aspects of their daily lives, including those which affect businesses.
In 2012, social media were already as important for consumers’ purchase decisions as TV ads, traditional direct marketing, and public advertising. They were even more important than radio!
Over the 19 industries covered by this report, social media influence the purchase decisions of German consumers on average by almost 8 percent.
The more involved people are in a particular purchase, the more they use social media.
On average, social media accounts for about 6 percent of the development of brand relationships.
In private life, social media are now the second most important communication medium for German consumers. Only the telephone is (still) more important.
Companies have not fully adapted to this change in society yet.
German advertising expenditures still have a considerably skewed distribution, favoring the established media channels TV and print. Although traditional websites and social media explain more than 22 percent of German consumers’ purchase decisions, German companies currently only spend 12 percent of their advertising budget on these channels.
Companies still fail to communicate effectively with consumers through social media. Currently, 60 percent of German consumers cannot see much value in the social media messages they receive from companies.
By and large, communication practices vary strongly between private and business communication. New means of communication and information sharing like social networks, messenger services, or location-based services are rarely used in German companies. Only 3 to 7 percent of German employees use these services frequently, and up to 86 have never used any of these services professionally.
Social media has transformed traditional marketing into a chaotic, haphazard game where old rules no longer apply and new rules have yet to emerge. In the face of such turmoil, how can companies play the game and win, using social technologies to support their business?
Read more in our new think:act content – Changing the Game.
Dear Social Media Think:Lab Thought Leaders’ Summit participants:
It was a great pleasure having all of you in Munich! Thanks a lot for all your brilliant ideas, all your enthusiasm, and all your whise structuring of the social media realm.
We are very much looking forward to your contributions to the upcoming special issue of the Journal of Interactive Marketing!
This is the press statement, which we send out today. As always, read it first on our blog:
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Press Statement: Social Media Think:Lab Thought Leaders’ Summit 2012
The development of “Strategies for Successfully Managing Businesses in a Social Media Environment” was the focus of a two-day, international summit of the leading social media researchers, which took place from 19th to 21st September in Munich.
Professor Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, Academic Director of the Social Media Think:Lab, sums up the results of the conference as follows: “Social media are influencing and impacting on marketing far more than most enterprises presently want to admit or accept. In five years’ time, no enterprise that rails against this societal change will still be competitive”. Professor Björn Bloching, Partner at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and co-founder of the Think:Lab adds: “The networked individual has not been a mere utopia for quite some time now. Social networks are in the process of completely reforming the reality of life for most people. From the business perspective, this applies to customers and employees alike”.
Therefore, the 30 researchers and social media experts confirm that in the coming years, enterprises will have to successively reconsider and adapt almost all processes that either relate to market-related communication or to that with employees. During the two and a half days, in six working groups, these processes, which range from customer relationship management to sales to the entire organization, were scrutinized in considerable detail. As part of the conference, the results were also discussed intensively by a committee comprising 30 German CEOs and marketing directors.
“Combining intellectual resources from academia and social media practitioners alike led to very profound and holistic discussions on that topic. I have not found something like that on any other social media conference yet” acknowledges Egbert Wege, Principal at Roland Berger. “The results make a substantial contribution to the state of the arts of marketing research and will therefore appear in edited form in a special edition of our journal”, promises the editor of the American research-oriented Journal of Interactive Marketing Prof. Dr. Charles Hofacker. For those who cannot wait that long, there will be an interim summary of the conclusions on the blog of the Social Media Think:Lab soon. For current information on this subject, see: www.socialmediathinklab.com.
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Presseerklärung: Social Media Think:Lab Thought Leaders‘ Summit 2012
Die Entwicklung von „Strategien zum erfolgreichen Management von Unternehmen in einer Social Media-bestimmten Umwelt“ standen im Zentrum des zweitägigen, internationalen Gipfeltreffens der führenden Social Media Forscher vom 19.-21. September 2012 in München.
„Soziale Medien beeinflussen das Marketing weit stärker, als die meisten Unternehmen es heute anerkennen möchten. In fünf Jahren wird kein Unternehmen mehr wettbewerbsfähig sein, welches sich diesem gesellschaftlichen Wandel verwehrt.“, fasst Professor Dr. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, wissenschaftlicher Direktor des Social Media Think:Lab, die Ergebnisse der Konferenz zusammen. „Der vernetzte Mensch ist längst keine Utopie mehr,“ ergänzt Prof. Dr. Björn Bloching, Partner bei Roland Berger Strategy Consultants und Mitgründer des Think:Lab. „Soziale Netzwerke sind im Begriff, vollständig mit der Lebensrealität der Menschen zu verschmelzen. Aus Unternehmenssicht gilt das für Kunden und Mitarbeiter gleichermaßen.“ Unternehmen werden daher in den nächsten Jahren sukzessive nahezu alle Prozesse überdenken und anpassen müssen, die entweder mit der Kommunikation mit den Märkten oder mit Mitarbeiterinteraktionen in Beziehung stehen, so das Fazit der 30 Forscher und Social Media Experten. Während der zweieinhalb Tage haben sie sich in sechs Arbeitsgruppen diese Prozesse von Customer Relationship Management über Vertrieb bis hin zur gesamten Unternehmensorganisation sehr genau angeschaut. Im Rahmen der Konferenz wurde die Ergebnisse außerdem mit einem Beirat aus 30 CEOs und Marketing-Direktoren führender Unternehmen intensiv diskutiert.
“Die Verbindung von Wissenschaft und Praxis hat der Diskussion um die Potentiale von Social Media eine Qualität gegeben, die man auf anderen Konferenzen oft vermisst”, resümiert Egbert Wege, Principal und Social Media-Experte bei Roland Berger Strategy Consultants. „Die Ergebnisse leisten einen substanziellen Beitrag zum aktuellen Stand der Marketing-Forschung und werden daher in aufgearbeiteter Form in einer Sonderausgabe unseres Journals erscheinen.“, verspricht der Editor des amerikanischen Forschungsmagazins Journal of Interactive Marketing Prof. Dr. Charles Hofacker. Wer nicht so lange warten möchte, findet in der Zwischenzeit auf dem Blog des Social Media Think:Lab aktuelle Informationen zu dem Thema: www.socialmediathinklab.com.
A couple of month ago we introduced the idea of understanding social media marketing as playing with a pinball machine. We are very happy that this idea now got also published in the German-speaking transfer journal Marketing Review St. Gallen. :-)
Social Media Think:Lab Thought Leaders‘ Summit: Day 2
“Business meets Academia” – the first session of the day was dedicated to an exchange of ideas between our business guests and academics.
We did not only want to give our business guests the chance to learn about social media by talking to the academics and asking them about their views but we also wanted to provide the academics with the opportunity to get some inspiring thoughts and ideas for their own research about social media. Hosted by Prof. Dr. Hennig-Thurau, the academics quickly started engaging with our and time passed by very fast.
After this short “Early-morning” session, the academics were heading back into their individual research tracks to finalize their presentation on the 6 different social media topics they were working since the day before.
Watch this little video snippet get an idea of what the “Social Media Metrics” group was working on. Prof. Dr. Kay Peters is presenting the first ideas which he elaborated on in the final presentations that every group gave in the morning and afternoon in front of the whole audience:
After a full 1.5 days the final presentations of the six research tracks have been very interesting and already were very promising in terms of what will come out as a Journal article in a special issue on social media in the Journal of Interactive Marketing.
Summit participants left the summit happily and are already looking forward to the Social Media Think:Lab Thought Leaders’ Summit 2013! Stay tuned!
Social Media Think:Lab Thought Leaders‘ Summit: Opening dinner & Day 1:
After the participants arrived in Munich on Wednesday, the summit started with a traditional Bavarian dinner at the “Museumsstüberl”. Host Thorsten Hennig-Thurau welcomed everyone before Charles Hofacker proved his skills when he opened a keg with a wooden hammer. The informal event was an excellent opportunity to meet old friends and get to know new people.
On Thursday, everyone was ready to discuss interesting social media topics. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau, Charles Hofacker as well as Björn Bloching and Egbert Wege from Roland Berger gave a short overview on the summit agenda and the work streams. The teams of world-leading social media academics and practitioners then discussed six social media topics.
At 5 pm, leading managers from different industries joined the group when Björn Bloching held his keynote speech, which showed the importance of customer data and gave several examples of good and bad “big data” usage. It was followed by an interesting panel discussion where academia had to answer practitioners’ questions. Discussions were continued during dinner at the “Dallmayr” with some nice food and wine.
Some of you might have noticed that for the last weeks, there wasn’t much to hear on and about our blog. It was because most of us have been on vacation either here
or here
.
However, now we are back and will devote our full attention to social media research again.
A lot has happened in the last weeks:
We have collected data for our first study on the influence of social media on consumers’ purchase behavior and brand relationship-intensity. The survey has been representative of Germany and will allows us to cluster into various groups. First results will be available by September-October 2012.
In our attempt to create a truly international summit we were able to win a great and highly acknowledged new sponsor. We are very honored to welcome Cass Business School, City University London as new sponsor for our event.
By 2015, more than half of the world’s formal contact centers will include a level of customer participation and engagement in the service process in real time.
For the next six years, most large customer service contact centers (200 agents and greater) will use a hybrid collection of customer software developed in-house, together with packaged software, but rarely a software suite from just one provider.
Software as a service (SaaS) in particular, and cloud computing in general, will open new opportunities to introduce social media into the customer service contact center, due to lower complexity and faster speed of implementation.
The need to be aware of, support and integrate users of Facebook, Twitter and off-portal communities is causing organizations to redesign existing/old service processes, and to identify potential process silos.”
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