Posts Tagged survey
Media Myths & Realities survey
Posted by John Weet in Social media on February 6, 2009
Bournemouth university and Ketchum have issued a press release announcing the survey mentioned in my previous post. The full press release can be seen here.
According to the release, the survey compares the media usage habits of 500 British consumers, 1,000 Americans consumers, 500 American communications industry professionals and 500 adult consumers in Brazil.
There are many interesting points raised and I really do need to try and get hold of the survey results.
One point worth mentioning, especially in light of the money programme that aired on the BBC last night, is the fact that in the UK consumers read national newspapers at nearly three times the rate of consumers in the U.S. (53 percent compared with 18 percent). Brazilians are even higher at 62 percent.
What is not said in the press release, but was stated in the presentation that I sat through, is when people say they get their news from the Telegraph, as an example, they are talking about the brand and not necessarily the newspaper. The brand will of course include the web site.
This is interesting in that a representative of one of the large UK nationals that was interviewed in the BBC programme has stated they are trying to take that brand into the US market. The reason is one of economics.
With printed newspapers you generally know the majority of your audience. They are constrained by the boundaries of your circulation. This make it easy when selling advertising space. Not so with the web, your audience could be anywhere. Not always an easy sell to a potential advertiser. If the brand has good recognition however, in the US markets then that opens the door to the vast sums of US advertising dollars that are lying around waiting to be picked up, simple isn’t it!
I started this post with a mention of Ketchum so plan to finish with one too. What a good example of how not to use social media. Off to give a talk to one of their largest customers on the use of social media a senior representative of Ketchum arrived at their town and made a twitter post “True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’” This post was subsequently seen by somebody at the company he was going to visit. A company who are fiercely proud of the town where they are based. To see the full story click here.
