• Erika L. Rich
    Yeah, who needs that "Twitter stuff or Facebook thing anyway" ... :) I think the skeptics might want to re-evaluate their position on Social Media marketing. http://www.brafton.com/news/88-percent-of-businesses-increasing-social-media-marketing-budgets-800495504
    88 percent of businesses increase social media marketing budgets
    www.brafton.com
    The State of Corporate Social Media in 2011 reveals that social marketing budgets are on the rise. Eighty-eight percent of U.S. marketers say they will be increasing their social media budgets this year.
    April 29, 2011 at 8:53am ·
    • Carol Bowen likes this.
      • Dave Watts Just because everyone's spending money on it doesn't mean it's effective or useful.
        April 29, 2011 at 9:14am
      • Erika L. Rich I guess you don't use it then? Because it's single handedly responsible for several companies/businesses success that I know. Without the local social reach, these businesses would have failed because either traditional print media was too expensive or the target audiences were only reachable via the Internet.

        So don't knock something unless you've embraced and tried it. ;)
        April 29, 2011 at 6:27pm
      • Dave Watts
        It's good that you know some successes with social media, since you work with it. But for every success that you know, how many companies are ploughing effort into it with no return? The article you cite mentions that companies are increasi...ng their budgets for this. It doesn't mean they're seeing any return on investment.

        Until I see hard numbers on success vs failure rates, I'm going to be as skeptical about this as I am about marketing in general. There's one group of people who clearly benefit from marketing, and that's marketers. The benefits for everyone else - sellers and consumers - is a lot more nebulous. Clearly there are some lines of business which benefit more from social media marketing than others. But do you really think that more than 80% of businesses fall into that category? I don't.        See More
        April 29, 2011 at 7:58pm
      • Dave Watts Oh, and as far as not knocking something until I've tried it: my office is across the street from the Church of Scientology. I have no intention of trying that either, and will continue to knock it as I see fit.
        April 29, 2011 at 8:17pm