If one rises above the bias of “lies, damn lies and statistics”, surveys across the globe seem to be crying hoarse that social media marketing will thrive in these times of recession. And this seems to be the verdict at both global and local/ Indian levels.
Millward Brown recently conducted a survey on behalf of PRWeek which indicates that 68% of marketers expect their advertising budgets to decrease in the coming year while 75% of those same marketers expect to spend more money than what they had budgeted on digital marketing programs.
Closer home, a poll of around 50 marketers by R3 shows that 3/4ths of Indian companies will either not up their marketing budgets in 2008-2009 or slash them down further. However, 40% of the respondents planned to spend more than originally planned on digital media.
Accoding to a paper by Forrester Research, “Strategies for Interactive Marketing in a Recession”, email marketing is likely to increase in recession even as marketing budgets get channelized towards more trackable online media such as search marketing programs. The research findings are also very optimistic about interactive social applications and word-of-mouth marketing because they depend on conversations of customers as opposed to a declining and limited ad budget.
Awareness Inc., a social media consultancy presents an interesting model to distinguish social media from direct marketing and brand marketing. See this fig. below:
I seem to be turning an evangelist of the cause..which I am, on second thoughts 🙂
Checkposts 
Informative post! Because social media has increasingly become part the marketing mix, your readers would also value from knowing about a relatively new focus in social media called tracking or metrics. Memcatch and a few other companies provide metrics to show you how popular your piece of information is after it has been shared to Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook. You can see which sites are producing the most value for your efforts. This effort alone can save professional social media people and bloggers time and money.
Thanks Peter! Will do some reading around it.