Social media marketing has gone from experimental to must-have. Close to 80 percent of marketers say they are planning to use social media in 2010.
However, it appears that we are still at the ‘figure it out’ stage in terms of integrating social media into marketing and PR planning, says marketing management firm Unica. While a majority of voting features, product reviews, user-generated content and RSS feeds are integrated with other campaigns, that is not true of efforts on social networking sites, blogs or microblogs.
According to eMarketer, the reason marketers have the perception that social media is easy and cheap to do. But much of the real cost of social campaigns is in the people-hours spent fostering and maintaining social conversations. And effectively allocating resources requires a social media strategy integrated with other activities.
