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2009 Credit Crunch leads to a boom in social marketing spend |
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Written by Jack Bremer
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Sunday, 05 April 2009 |
With the aroma of doom and gloom curling the nasal hairs of anyone waking up to smell the roses, you would be forgiven for thinking that the credit crunch, recession, financiapocalypse or whatever you choose to call it has meant that firms the world over have restricted their budgets for everything! Well, just as we suspected, it turns out it's just about everything - social marketing spend is actually on the increase for over 50% of firms in the US, and often at the expense of other forms of marketing.
Forrester Research's recent publication, Social Media Playtime Is Over, presents the results of a survey of 145 global interactive marketers in both B2B and B2C companies with more than 250 employees and puts social marketing spend on the rise in more than half of them.
Given the harsh realities of the global economic crisis, most firms are having to do more with less, and in this era of worldwide social networking and collaboration platforms, the firms that are no longer taking an experimental approach but rather integrating this opportunity into their overall marketing strategy are reaping the rewards. Value is derived from the impact of instant distribution of marketing messages, the encouragement of online discussion, the immediacy of online recommendation, through tools which often carry no direct cost.
So why, you might ask, are companies spending many hundreds of thousands of pounds or dollars if the tools are essentially free? Well, many firms are busy pulling themselves through the quagmire of the recession by their bootstraps, cutting spend in most areas and focusing on cost-efficient, quantifiable, solid-ROI business functions - social marketing can be all of these if managed properly, and that requires expert knowledge of the tools at hand (we would counsel against giving this important duty to a marketing junior with limited online experience!). The word "quantifiable" has an important place here - website analytics usually focus on page views and navigation paths, but the metrics of the social web are geared towards the analyses of fanbase growth, e-reputation management and discussion-to-conversion trends amongst other things. With much of the brand interaction going on outside your own website (think Skittles!) and sometimes even the transactional element too, these other factors become ever-increasingly important.
Web analytics can be used on some social networks (niche social network platform, ning.com for example allows the simple inclusion of Google Analytics code) but for many you will be relying on their own stats (Facebook's page impressions and fan numbers for example) to build your own reports.
If your organisation is considering testing the social waters, we encourage you to speak to experts... 3B Digital are available to discuss the options available to your firm, and any such discussion will begin around your business model/plan, current web presence and existing social exposure - we understand the pressures on companies of all sizes, and can consult on online marketing strategies, development of applications (think Facebook & iPhone), building of communities and the generation of discussion and feedback.
Forrester Research [via ReadWriteWeb]
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