According to the latest report from Forrester, Social Media Marketing will hit an annual spend of $3.1 Billion by 2014, making it the fastest growing marketing segment in the mix.  Analyst Shar VanBoskirk makes a great point in the report summary:

“…the most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline.  Yep.  With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.”

There must be some wood behind this social media arrow….I’m just sayin’…

Being a marketer that works for a very large technology corporation, Intel, part of my job is to identify places where conversations about our products and technologies are happening.  In my opinion (disclaimer: not to be mistaken as the overall opinion of Intel as a corporation), there are several ways to intersect those conversations, effectively.  My goal is to always ‘listen’ first.  What are people saying about our products, our technologies, and our importance to their lives.  That’s an important point.  It provides you with the very tenor of the conversation and sets the tone for if, when, and how you participate in their conversation.  I believe, as a ‘guest’ to their watercooler discussion, we join the conversation on their terms and have a responsibility to be informative, helpful, and most importantly – not disruptive.  In the last several years, we have done this with a high degree of success – and they have all been paid sponsorships of conversations in specific communities, such as Slashdot and Arstechnica.  I’ve had several conversations with Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester about this very topic.  You can find his perspective here.  Moving forward, I believe we find a balance between paid conversations and also enabling our workforce to speak effectively about the products and technologies we market on their own, unpaid, personal social media efforts.