How "Socially Savvy" Are Dutch Agencies? (part 1)

(note: most of our publications are in English because we have English(-only) speaking customers and readers)

Last week we got the idea to investigate how "socially savvy" Dutch marketing and communications agencies are. This is what we did:

1. We had a look at the Marcom500 database on the Adformatie web site which, strangely enough, contains not 500 but 800 marketing and communication agencies.
2. From these 800 businesses we took a random sample of 200 names.
3. For each of these 200 companies we checked their web sites, blogs, and we tried all kinds of searches on Google, Facebook, Hyves, YouTube, Twitter, and other networks.
4. This resulted in a big spreadsheet full of social data, and a number of interesting statistics.
5. We also sent an email to all 800 businesses in the Marcom500 database, inviting them to tell us about their social media activities. Within just a few days we got almost 100 replies.
6. To keep things fair, we did not mix the answers that were emailed to us with the random sample. We treated these as two different sources of data.

On Thursday, 18th of February, we briefly presented our early findings at the Social Media Congres in Amsterdam, and we issued a press release as well.

Before we dive into our statistics and findings, we should first address some important concerns:

• We are not a professional research agency, and our findings should be treated as such. We like to investigate things and we prefer to share our findings with others. But our results should merely be seen as an indication, not as a definitive answer.
• Our research is not intended as an evaluation of how "good" businesses are at using social media. There can be many reasons for not using certain networks or media. We merely intended to discover how social media are used, and by which agencies.
• Some criticism is justified regarding our treatment of businesses vs. individuals. In some agencies individual employees are heavy social media users. But we only looked at what the agencies themselves do on-line. Time did not permit us to take people's individual blogs and private LinkedIn and Twitter profiles into account.
• There are of course many more marketing and communication agencies than just those in the Marcom 500 database. Again, available time required us to limit the extent of our research.
• We also had to discard content that was not published under the name of the agency. Movies on YouTube, photo's on Flickr, and blog posts on generic marketing blogs were not investigated if not published through a channel of the agency itself.
• Also, some agencies are socially very active under the names of their customers, but don't publish anything under their own names. Again, these were not taken into account in this research.
• Some agencies are part of international businesses. In these cases we only looked at the profiles and channels that were specifically Dutch. We ignored all blogs, social accounts and channels that are published or managed from other parts of the world.
• Finally, we specifically did not include social media agencies. (They weren't present in the Marcom500 database anyway.)

If this still leaves you with questions or concerns about our research, please contact us, or send us a message on Twitter.

Coming up next... How "Socially Savvy" Are Dutch Agencies? (part 2)

1 comment(s) for “How "Socially Savvy" Are Dutch Agencies? (part 1)”

1. Martin Says:
   Tuesday, March 02, 2010Marcom500 database on the Adformatie web site which, strangely enough, contains not 500 but 800 marketing and communication agencies.
   ;) Top 500 involves the advertisers, which consists, as we speak, out of 500 companies!