PaulBiggs.com

Social media spending trends for 2010: engagement, not ads

A recent eMarketer survey/article shed some light on where online marketers plan to put their social media program dollars over the next few years -- not on ads, but on engagement. Compare these 2 charts:

#1 - Social Site Ad Spend

 

#2 - Social Media Marketing Outreach

Look how much faster the second chart grows. This is huge. It's one thing to spend more dollars and distribute more ads, but it's a whole different bag of tricks to actually reach out and get more deeply engaged with your customers and prospects. eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson suggests that savvy companies will be spending the bulk of their time and resources on:

• creating and maintaining fan pages
• managing promotions or public relations outreach within social networks
• measuring the impact of a social network presence on brand health and sales

We've already seen Facebook and Twitter eclipse Google (though I've yet to see those sources bring my B2B sites more traffic or leads -- SEO is still going strong!), so these are green fields ripe for innovation. And Jive is helping companies explore these channels, with its online community software and social media monitoring and engagement solutions, so it's exciting to be in the thick of it. From a marketing perspective, we have some big plans for 2010 that involve creative social media initiatives (as opposed to just rolling out more ads to the masses)... stay tuned!

Building a personal brand -- blogging on PaulBiggs.com

Ok. I'm kicking off a new blog here at PaulBiggs.com, after a couple years of testing the waters over on Techpaulogy. It's time to focus more on my personal brand -- connected to my name -- where I can extrapolate beyond the 140-character blurbs on Twitter. I'll be writing on topics related to:

• The daily travails of an online marketer in the B2B software field
• Overall industry trends in social media, internet marketing, search engines, etc.
• Adventures while living in Portland, OR
• The local tech and entrepreneurial scene

I'll still keep Techpaulogy around to geek out on software, gadgets, and apps of interest to the general public (and, of course, SEO), and continue to use it as a test bed for my various Web endeavors. 

See you online!

(You can subscribe to the new PB.com RSS feed here: http://feeds.paulbiggs.com/PaulBiggs)