Social Networks continue to show a strong future of growth.
Two recent Forrester reports published by my colleagues, Josh Bernoff and Oliver Young, both showing the future of social computing for the interactive marketer and for enterprise 2.0 purchasing. A very obvious trend for both of these reports is the growth of budgets by marketers and companies for social networks.
I’m not releasing any new information here, but just highlighting the public data that they both point out:
Social technology marketers bullish in face of recession
We polled interactive marketers with the following question: “Assuming that the economy is in a recession in the next six months, how would you change your Investments in the following marketing channels?” Over 40% of them indicated that they will increase spending on social networks even in face of a recession during the next 6 months.
Josh writes: “Social networks will get the largest number of increases, over 40% of those using it, along with user-generated content, blogs, and that old standby, email marketing.”
Forecast: Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Spend By Technology, 2007 To 2013
In Oliver Young’s report on Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 To 2013, or read the blog post, and the graph has been published on Read Write Web and ZDnet, Enterprise spending of social computing software (internal and external) his report provided some clear forecasts demonstrating that purchasing in social networking software (like this white label list) will increase, and take the largest segment of the budget.
Your internal discussion
You should forward these stats to the web strategy teams within your company, and start a discussion answering each of the following questions:
Is your organization of what social networks are (believe me, many aren’t)? Are you aware of why social networks are so important (talk about trust)? Is your marketplace using social networks? if so, which ones? What are you competitors or others in your industry going? What are people doing in social networking sites in our marketplace?
That’s just the exploratory questions you’ll need to answer, there’s a much large discussion you’ll need to have, after the awareness questions are answered.
I’ve published quite a few posts on social networks, view archives.
Those questions you pose are of utmost importance. In times of economic slowdown, budget cutters look to marketing first. And many senior marketing decision makers go for the things they don’t quite relate to, that they may not either be influenced by or things they don’t perceived that they’re influenced by.