Look before you leap at Social Media

By Stephen Rhodes
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post Lost in the new world of advertising I ran across an interesting study on eMarketer by Debra Aho Williamson, who recently completed a  report “Social Media in the Marketing Mix: Budgeting for 2011″ that suggest companies are increasing their budgets this year as they move from cautious experimentation to full implementation in Social Media.

She says companies are expanding budgets for social media marketing not because they have been successful at it, but because they are relying on gut instinct—the feeling that “this is something important so I’m going to do it even if I don’t know why.” Or worse, they have watched their competitors earn accolades in the press for their work in social media, and they are afraid of losing any more ground.

She concludes these are exactly the wrong reasons to increase spending on social media.

Read her post.