According to a study presented at a Pivot Conference (in partnership with Extra Mile Research) entitled "Marketers' Current and Future Use of Social Media," 63% of marketers are already investing in social media marketing, and of the 37% that are not currently investing in social media marketing, 62% are planning to invest, including 46% who plan to do so within one year.

Other key findings include:

• 57% welcome social media users involvement and participation with their brands
•  Of those already investing in social media marketing, 87% plan to increase their expenditures in the next 12 months, including 56% who plan significant increases in spending.
• Only 30% of marketers who conduct social media marketing have measurement and analysis strategy fully implemented.
• 43% of marketers who conduct social media marketing have not begun implementing any measurement or analysis programs
• Of those who have measurement and analysis programs in place, 62% are only "somewhat satisfied" with their programs
•  Despite all of the focus and investment in social media marketing, only 30% consider their social media marketing efforts "very successful." 59% rate their efforts as "somewhat successful."
• 75% of marketers consider the "always-on" 18-34 year old consumers as a primary or secondary target.
• Marketers feel that the "always-on" 18-34 year old consumers have unique characteristics:
• 70% of marketers consider them to have a shorter attention span
• 67% consider them to have different motivations than previous generations
• 59% consider them to be less accepting and more questioning of marketing messages in general

CMO Matrix: How Social Technology Must Integrate with Traditional Marketing, a Horizontal Approach

Marketing Tactic	Why It’s Important	Opportunities of Social Technology
Market Research	You can’t effectively reach consumers till you know about them, and market research is a key function for any corporation. For some time, market research was limited to focus groups, consumer testing, and survey based methodology. This includes both traditional marketing research groups as well as competitive intelligence groups.	Now, with the advent of social technologies, at least three forms of opportunity have emerged:  1) Using brand monitoring technology to harvest what consumers are already saying in social channels, 2) Harnessing the crowd to find out their real time reactions, see how Communispace and Passenger have done this.  3) Using innovation tools like Salesforce Ideas, UserVoice, GetSatisfaction to build products in real time with consumers.
Corporate Website	The corporate website is a source of product factual information, and pro-brand materials.  This is the master repository of a brand, it’s products, and services.	Social technologies are being integrated in three phases: 1) Standalone tools like communities are built, but not integrated, 2) Social login systems like FB connect and Open ID are increasing conversion rates 3) Social context is being developed so content is served up on the fly from social data. See my keynote at Gilbane’s CMS conference on social and corporate website integration.
Intranet	Marketing must influence internal stakeholders, including sales, field marketing, and product teams.  The intranet is a key internal repository of information, this would also include any associated email communications.	Social technologies are being deployed internally like PBWorks, Socialcast, Basecamp, and Yammer without the consent of IT.  The opportunity to use these tools to allow teams to find experts, information regardless of region or time are ripe.
Email Marketing	Email, one of the primary forms of digital communication is often a highly trusted source when customers have opt-in.  When you look closely, email is a social network, see how Google wants to do it. In fact, the root information requirement for Twitter and Facebook is a verified email.	Email marketing companies are starting to offer ’sharing’ features so recipients are encouraged to quickly share the information with their peers, as well as offering brands SMMS systems to manage this information.  Expect the Facebook inbox and email marketing to quickly merge in coming years,
Search Marketing	A mature practice that attracts buyers and prospects during their core information seeking phase, SEM is critical to reaching the information starved through well placed sponsored information and advertisements	We’re also seeing an influx of social advertisements appear as the social graph is infused in search results. Example: We’re starting to see the content our friends recommend in search engine results, and Facebook’s foray with social ads.
Search Engine Optimization	Fine tuning websites so they are the first choice in organic search results is both a science and art by experienced practitioners.	Social media tools, esp blogs and ratings and review sites like Yelp score high in organic search due to many incoming links and freshly updated content.
Advertising	Often the bulk of most marketing budgets, advertising is key in many phases of the customer journey, in particular driving awareness and consideration.	Like SEM listed above, advertising can become more efficient in the future by tapping into social profile data (who is this person) and their social graph (who do they trust) to serve up relevant content.  As Facebook spreads their features all over the web (analysis), expect a new form of advertising to appear based on social data.  Twitter’s “Sponsored Links” bodes similar experimentation
Sponsorship	Marketers drive associative branding and qualified leads through sponsorship opportunities.	Social helps in two specific ways:  New influencers have emerged such as ‘Mom and Dad bloggers” creating more niched inventory with deeper engagement to sponsor.  Furthermore, all traditional sponsorship activities can use social marketing for further engagement.
eCommerce	While over a decade old, online shopping has continued to be primary low cost driver for the brick and mortar company.	The mainstay integration has been consumer ratings and reviews from the aggregation of the crowd, often powered by vendors like Bazzarvoice.  Yet expect new forms of eCommerce to evolve as an individuals social graph is connected to eCommerce tools. See how Levi’s has done it, and attend our conference, the Rise of Social Commerce.
Mobile Marketing	While in it’s infancy, marketers may use these tools to connect with consumers as they are on a specific location, during a certain part of the day, with greater context.	Now, as consumers indicate their location and time while on the go, marketers may reach them using a variety of contextual information, advertisements, and harnessing what their friends have done before them in the same locations.  See how Starbucks sponsored mayorship in Foursquare to increase both loyalty and WOM.
TV/Radio	The pioneering mediums in the electronic communication realm, these mediums provide content in a one way format.	Programs (radio hosts, newscasters, and stations) are using social technologies to infuse a two way relationship with listeners by finding new content in social channels (Watching Twitter) as well as integrating the voices of the audience, and empowering communities to build around them.  Perhaps more importantly, this creates new forms of inventory for these mediums to enable brands to sponsor or get involved with.
Print	From newspapers, magazines, to flyers, nothing creates an experience like holding physical paper in front of you.	Nearly all of these publications have associated social media properties, from Facebook fan pages, to supplementary blogs.  In fact, if paper adoption continues to decrease, these social tools provide a low-cost method of publishing and interacting with their audiences.  Magazines like Dwell have launched thriving online communities and nearly all national and many global newspapers have adopted social media in their online resources.
Field, Persona, Channel, and Regional Marketing	Marketing teams are often segmented by regions, or to sit with sales units in the field, or even to target specific consumer types, like moms. This segmented marketing approach is key for deeper context in approaching unique markets.	Like in other forms, don’t expect a one-size-fits all approach, each audience type will have a different penchant for social media technologies, which we call socialgraphics. Expect a tailored approach using social technologies to emerge for each of these groups as you reach different audiences.

Experience in social media tactics - For simplicity's sake, lets look at what most marketers go through (including this one). Here are three stages of adoption:

• Social Media Experiments - usually the first year or two of unconnected social media programs involving bloggers, video content distribution, cgm/ugc contests and other tactics.
• Adoption and Integration - in the following years, the value or success of social media is felt within and there is a push to do more and integrate it with more people and disciplines.
• Go 'Big' - after some experience and success following integration, brands can't help but want to "go big" either with a substantial facebook campaign or a more impactful integration (e.g. committing to 20 people in social customer care via Twitter and Live chat). usually these brands have sketched out a measurement model that reassures them the effort is smart business.

Social media business mindset - Is using social media an obligation due to outside pressures (your CEO, board, competitors all told you to do it in one way or another)? Or do you see a way - perhaps murky now - but a way that all of the implied qualities of social media may actually change your business? I see plenty of CMOs and CCOs who fit into both camps. So, the choice is between social media as obligation or social media as quest.

1. Social Media - As mentioned before, this medium is an excellent source of real time data that is authentic for being delivered first person from the end user without being pre-packaged into a survey or other pre-defined format. There are now a wide variety of software companies able to track, parse and do metrics on this information, including the use of natural language processing in order to better extract changes in sentiment toward a product or campaign.
2. Marketing Strategy - Marketing strategy is not only informed by Social Media, it works bi-laterally, utilizing the social web to broadcast its initatives and engage potential customers with more accurate targeting and quicker response. Both components inform each other and mutually enhance value plus performance.
3. Business Intelligence - The success or failure of marketing campaigns as well as the more granular data that is returned by parsing through interactions can then be fed into business intelligence systems that process this information either automatically or in conjunction with a marketing professional. Generally speaking, both methods are used, with automated processes often revealing marketing insights that could otherwise go unseen.
4. CRM - Interaction data, campaign response and output from Business Intelligence querys can all inform how customers are handled, and these customer relations strategies can be updated with greater frequency and granularity with regards to demographics, purchase history and location. This is enabled by the rapid feedback that Social Media and Business Intelligence processing provide.
5. Internal Business Processes - In the same way that customer facing activity can respond quickly to a more direct communication with the customer base, internal processes can now have the necessary data to make increased agility even more productive.

You have got a few employees managing your social media accounts, and you've amassed some followers, friends and contacts. You've posted a few tweets and blogs marketing your product or service to consumers, but you're still stumped at how to reach out to other businesses.

Using social media for business-to-business marketing can be integral to promoting your company and forging industry contacts, especially when you're involved in areas of retail and trade. The truth is, using social media for your B2B efforts isn't much different from marketing to consumers. It's just a matter of shifting your focus and keeping your ear closer to the ground.

 How to Use Social Media for B2B Marketing: Defining Your Target Audience

When developing your B2B strategy for social media, the place to start out is to find out where other businesses are going. Who are you trying to market to, and which social media platform are they using? Are there business owners or certain employees that you are looking for? Where are they getting their information?

Derek Edmond, a managing partner at Waltham, Mass.-based B2B marketing firm KoMarketing Associates, suggests using the search function that most social media sites have, such as those of Facebook or LinkedIn. "Most of these sites even have an advanced search option, so that you can scour through regions and titles," Edmond says.

You're likely to find correspondence from individual employees of companies rather than the company itself, says Edmond, and you should keep this in mind as you refine your contact list. One way to do this, with Twitter, for example, is to look through the Twitter lists of other users and follow people with the titles you're looking for.

Dig Deeper: How to Define Your Target Market

How to Use Social Media for B2B Marketing: Monitoring Before You Act

Once you have defined your target audience and started developing your B2B contacts, don't immediately start spamming your latest press releases, says Edmond. The key is to contribute to the conversation before you jump in trying to market services. "If there's a Twitter chat going on, join the chat before trying to promote your agenda," he says. "Anyone can post a link to Twitter, but the question is, how do you make them pay attention to it?" One effective way of searching for topics and active conversations on Twitter is to click on or search for certain hashtags relevant to your industry.

Before you start aggressively pursuing your strategy, you should also be monitoring what people are saying about your company by setting up an account with Google Alerts and searching social media sites with tools like Radian6, Salesforce.com or Social Mention. You can also read or subscribe to the blogs of the companies you want to market to, so that you can respond and comment whenever a post grabs your attention.

Dig Deeper: Survey Says Social Media Generates Business

The ensuing tsunami highlights some marketing ‘nuances’ in the new media versus old media business.

As we've noted, Ben & Jerry's has doubled down on social media, expanding its Facebook superstar status into the digital realm with a clever mobile app that recently added augmented reality.

Despite being owned by the gargantuan Unilever, B&J has built its brand success on down home, folksy values – including a consistent barrage of e-mails to their loyal fan club. But several factors influenced the decision to get more social in the U.K.

Market research indicated email fatigue, mobile-happy youths prefer social media, management needed to trim costs while spreading a wider net over their ‘digitally fragmented’ fans, and U.S. successes in social media made the move seem a good idea.

Even so, many customers (and marketers) still prefer old-school email.

“While some are willing to jump solely on the social media bandwagon, the majority recognise that email is the gateway to building a meaningful presence on these channels and the two go hand-in-hand," writes Andy Taylor in Brand Republic.

From a marketer's perspective, email’s strengths include segmentation and trackability, as opposed to a "scatter gun" spray-and-pray approach that can limit social media as a standalone medium; comparatively low cost; respectable ROI; and easily integrated with other channels.

Social media, while inarguably the new frontier, takes a blast approach reaching critical mass more cheaply – but in cutting such a broad swathe – may lose overall impact.

The customer relationships B&J has built over the years – largely through e-mail, may be sacrificed by switching solely to social media: “With email the data is yours – in the social mediaverse you’re entirely at the mercy of the channel.”

Social media is blast broadcasting. While B&J may have 1.3 million Facebook fans – this medium requires fans check-in first whereas email is passive -- it comes to you. Of course, brands can't interact with customers on email, but can initiate and continue multiple conversations with social media.

1.) Sporadic Updates - If you are only occasionally updating your social media profile, network, group, fan page, blog, etc., you are likely to lose followers and potential clients/customers, as well as discourage your current clients. It is absolutely imperative to update all social platforms frequently with status updates, new pictures, interactive ideas (such as events and contests), and any information that will keep users coming back to your profile or website. These are your returning visitors, and they are very important to the success of your social media strategy.

Tip: Set aside a specific block of time each day to devote to your social media accounts.

2.) Too Many Profiles - Many businesses mistakenly choose quantity over quality in this area. Signing up for every social media site you can find can actually be detrimental to your social media strategy. One reason for this is that not all social media sites will work for all businesses. You want to find the best sites for your particular business or niche, and be sure to be active. Having an overabundance of profiles to update and networks to engage in can be extremely overwhelming and almost guarantees sporadic updating (refer to number one above) because you simply won't have enough time to be as attentive as necessary.

Tip: Be selective. Join a handful of relevant social media sites that fit your company’s needs.

3.) Not Becoming Engaged - Ideally, you should make it a point to recognize and reply to every comment you receive on your blog, website, status updates, tweets, articles, etc. You want your profiles to engage your friends/contacts/followers through comment replies on status updates, pictures, etc. Ignoring the opportunity to engage and interact with your community is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in the social media arena.

Tip: Set up e-mail notifications to alert you to new comments.

4.) Confusing Marketing with Engaging - There was a recent study done by Citibank which shows that 76% of small business owners feel that social media sites are not giving them the business leads they need. However, this is not because the leads are not there. The reason for this is that these companies are attempting traditional marketing and sales strategies in the world of social media instead of taking the time to listen to their clients and learn more about their needs.

Tip: Utilize consistent, relevant, fresh content to "market" your company. Your content should do all of your marketing for you.

5.) Spamming or Excessive Promoting/Advertising - In recent years, many companies have become involved in spamming as a method of advertising. This tactic no longer works as internet users have become savvier and learned to ignore and filter these messages without even looking at them. Be very careful when hiring an internet marketing agency because some of the self-proclaimed "experts" in this area simply launch spamming campaigns which are highly unethical and largely ineffective.

Tip: Obtain a marketing outline from the agency which illustrates their marketing strategy for your company, brand, services, and/or products before signing any contracts.

6.) "Generic" or "Stock" Avatar - Clients and potential clients alike can become suspicious of companies that use the website's stock avatar or profile picture. It can cast doubt about the credibility of the company. In addition, this is an indication that the company is not experienced with and/or knowledgeable about social media.

Tip: Use your company's logo as your avatar on sites that allow it. On sites which require an actual photo of the profile owner, use the best picture of yourself that you have access to. Try to make the photo that you use as professional as possible.

7.) Not Having a Plan - A lack of planning, preparation, organization, and strategy will result in the failure of a company’s social media campaign. It takes more than simply launching a profile, blog, or social media presence to run a successful campaign. Appropriate planning and follow up are integral to the success of any social media strategy.

Tip: First, identify your purpose and audience. This will make it easier to formulate a plan, prepare, organize, and strategize.

Marketers should embrace social media failures, rather than fear them, according to a recent blog post from Sysomos. In a posting on the Sysomos blog, Mark Evans says that while social media marketers focus on "home runs" such as the recent successful Old Spice viral campaign (see below), failures are much more common. However, unless the failures are truly spectacular, they tend to be overlooked. However, Evans advises there are several positives marketers can obtain from failed social media campaigns:    Learning What Doesn't Work: Failure offers insight into activities that were not effective and didn’t resonate with users. By putting the spotlight on failure, companies can get a better handle on the best ways to approach social media while avoiding strategic and tactical pitfalls.     Encouraging Experimentation: By accepting failure as a positive rather than a negative, it lets companies experiment with social media without being overly skittish about something not working well. Despite the hype, the social media marketing vertical is still at a stage in which experimentation is an important part of the market’s evolution.     Allowing Growth: If fear of failure makes marketers afraid to experiment, the best ideas will never get a chance to become discovered and flourish. Instead, marketers will stick with a few basic "tried and true" social media ideas, stunting growth and denying the industry the chance to take full advantage of what social media has to offer.