Marketing chiefs play down value of social networks

Only 10% of respondents said they used social networking in their marketing plans, with 55% saying they were not too interested or not interested at all.

Ian Hitt, managing director of Epsilon International, said social networking sites have a narrow appeal and it is a challenge to measure their results.

Yet, of the marketers surveyed, 27% said they wanted to develop social networking and word-of-mouth in their campaigns.

E-mail is the ad channel marketers said they were least likely to cut back in the current economic climate. Nick Christie, UK country director of Epsilon International, said retailers see the equivalent of 14p revenue from each e-mail delivered, which shows the "measurability and profitability" of e-mail at a time when that is very important.

Of those people who were not employing web analytics at the moment, 55% of respondents said they planned to in the next year.

Almost all marketing executives (93%) said the current economic situation will have a moderate or significant impact on their marketing efforts in the next few months. In addition, 70% said they will decrease advertising expenditures specifically.

Epsilon provides marketing services to various international brands. This survey was carried out online in October and completed by consumer and business-to-business marketing executives from brands with revenues from £150m to more than £6bn.