social media practitioner survey

12 Aug, 2009 • posts i've written • 3 comments

We at Undercurrent have put together a survey for social media practitioners I’d like to share. (and hope you’ll share, too)

http://bit.ly/socialmediasurvey
* please use the bit.ly link when sharing
** and how about the hashtag #smsurvey when tweeting

The objective of this survey is to gain a greater understanding of how social media is put in practice by agencies and clients, including: how objectives are defined, how results are measured, who is doing the work, the level of compensation, and what resources are most popular among practitioners.

Who should take the survey? Anyone that handles social media strategy, manages a social media team (internal or external), or conducts social media outreach on behalf of or within a brand.

It’s important to get a wide variety of data, so please share and spread this survey. We’ll keep the survey open during the month of August.

The survey should only take about 10 minutes of your time.

What are we doing with this data? We plan on releasing a free report (probably slideshare) on our findings, along with a free download of the full dataset. We’re hoping that what we collect will be beneficial for the entire industry. When you’re done with the survey, you’ll see a link to follow to request the report and dataset.

You may remember an earlier post of mine where I solicited feedback for the survey. Thanks to everyone for chiming in. Also a big thanks to Heather LeFevre, author of the Planner Survey, of which I drew great inspiration.

I can’t stress enough how much I need your help in spreading the survey to social media groups you may be a member of, to your industry friends, to your clients (this could lead to some very compelling insights), and to your co-workers.

If you have any issues at all with the survey, I’m your man, so please leave a comment below.

Also, after taking the survey, I invite you to leave a comment back here to let me know any data in particular you’re interested in seeing charted. (like average salary, or seniority)

eyes on your neighbor’s work

11 Jun, 2009 • posts i've written • 8 comments

I’ve been jotting notes in the margins of late on the subject of this whole social media phenom and its actual use among brands and agencies.

Like the planner survey, I’m putting together a medium sized survey to pass around the web to take the pulse of the what, why, where, and what the hell for social media (specifically the being social part) and its uses. I plan on wrapping up a concise report to share along with the full data set.

But I need YOUR help.

I need people to care about taking and spreading the survey.

Which means people need to be invested in learning what the survey could possibly answer.

Which means I need to know what YOU care about learning.

Here are topics I’m already considering:

- Who’s doing the actual social outreach: the brands, the agencies, the PR firms, the interns?
- What are the resources being allocated by brands: size of their own teams, budgets, and more?
- What are the typical job titles and salaries for the people doing the work?
- What are the most used mechanisms for social outreach: email, phone, twitter, facebook pages… ?
- What are the business objectives, and how is social media being measured and reported?
- How are learnings from interaction with your customers affecting the actual production of your products?
- I’m interested in success stories beyond the usual suspects

And I’d like to segment this data by industry, company type (brand, agency, PR firm, etc), size, country/region…

In the comment box below, please help answer: what am I missing, what specifically should I be asking, has another survey already accomplished this, do you give a shit?