A new study released by the Pivot Conference surveyed 230 brand managers, executives, and marketing professionals. Brian Solis offers a lengthy report that contains an amazing amount of useful information. (Seriously, our heads are stuffed from trying to absorb it all.)

You can read the whole thing, but for the moment we want to show you our perspective. We don’t disagree with anything Mr. Solis wrote, we just happened to see the data a little differently.

Maybe it’s just the angle, or a trick of the light…

Or maybe we need new glasses.

Have a look.

Respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction with the social advertising campaigns they’ve used to date.

Businesses appear to find social advertising successful or worthy of investment. 54% are satisfied or very satisfied with their experiences within social advertising to date.

But our view of that graph shows that 1% of respondents were not satisfied. Only 1%! That’s a better satisfaction rating than… well, anything we can write about here.

They were also asked to rate how valuable they expect the benefits of social advertising to be over the next two years.

Optimism is rife regarding social advertising. Of those businesses that responded, 60% anticipate that social advertising will be very valuable to them. Another 32% view social advertising as valuable, regardless of the level of satisfaction with past efforts.

Again, we see a different angle. We see that not even 1% of the folks queried felt that social adverising would be “Not very valuable/Worthless” in the next two years. And remember, that’s “regardless of the level of satisfaction with past efforts”.

They were also queried about social advertising methods they have used. The report highlights which methods currently in use respondents intend to increase:

• %
• Social Media Optimization 42%
• Viral Video creation 30%
• Paid social placements 27%
• Promoted Tweets 21%

And notes:

We were surprised at the low level of advocacy/ambassador programs across the board.

But once more, it’s another facet that catches our attention. Namely, the percentage of respondents who currently use social advertising and plan to decrease efforts — across the board, the answers were only single digits.

So while the report focuses on the businesses who declare satisfaction with their efforts, consider them valuable, and intend to increase their efforts we were busy looking through a different lens…

What we see most clearly are the surprisingly low numbers of businesses who are dissatisfied, don’t consider social advertising advantageous, and who plan to decrease their investment.

Which shows us that the businesses who are putting effort into social marketing campaigns clearly know a good thing when they see it… and they see the potential regardless of their experiences to date, which are overwhelmingly positive anyway.

See what we’re saying?

Or would you like to borrow our glasses?

Of course… you’ll have to get them away from Poo Monkey first.