Over the weekend I did some research examining the Top 10 social media questions marketers want answered, as outlined in the 2011 Social Media Marketing report – How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses, for a possible article (the article itself, is still pending, but hopefully will be published soon) but the research doesn’t need to be, so I’m publishing it here.

The report is authored by Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner in April, 2011, the reason I choose it had more to do with focusing on what “social marketers want”; using MarketWire Sysomos I was able to find a variety of verbatim around the top 10 questions Michael Stelzner said marketers who took his survey this year, wanted.   Note: you will need to download the 2011 Social Marketing Report at Social Media Examiner to get all the details and the top 10 questions (pages 6-9 of the report).

I will refer to the report as SME 2011 hereafter.

The research was extremely taxing but I was pretty happy with the queries I wrote in Sysomos.

My approach differs from SME 2011; I conducted research by using MarketWire Sysomos; covering a wide spectrum of mentions between 8/1/10-7/31/11 using specially constructed search queries while Stelzner conducted primary research based on 3300 respondents out of the 94,000 email subscribers (about 4% of his mailing list). One can expect different approaches will yield different results, and they did.

What marketers appear to want, based on what they said in the SME 2011 report is bit different than what I found using Sysomos.  It seemed as if the most important need right now, is for Social Marketers to master the platforms they are working on, and not so much for figuring out Social Media ROI, which SME 2011 claims to be the primary need of marketers surveyed.  In fact, you can see the differences between the SME 2011 ranking (gray column) and my ranking (green column). Their next most important need is to integrate and manage the programs being set up in Social Media with the rest of the marketing programs a company runs (same in SME 2011 and my research).

I won’t provide the full queries (I can’t, for some reason, I can’t find the exact queries I need in my browser history).

My take away from this research is we need to constantly look at  new technologies to see what makes sense , and try to set aside a few hours a week, or whenever we can,  in order to discover new solutions that may work for us.

I have come across so many businesses that don’t know what is out there. Social media as  research tool is  more interesting than tracking social media campaigns.

Finally, I like this kind of investigative work (and wish I were doing more of it); this kind of research is useful in finding out what material to develop based what people are saying they need.