In my morning’s email, Jeremiah Owyang sent out a new report that highlights what social media spending looked like in 2010 and how to plan for 2011. I was surprised to see the average spending across companies (of all sizes) was $833,000.
Of course, much of this spending was based on:
- The maturity level of a company doing social media
- Team size
- How social media was organized in that company
He broke maturity levels down into three buckets: Novice, Intermediate and Advanced. Here’s a chart that company maturity levels drive the budget and social media deployment:
In many of the clients we work with on social media, it usually starts out as a somewhat centralized approach where there is a person or two internally who is a social media champion. Over time as the acceptance level arises, we start to see more a hub and spoke approach where the participation is broader and distributed over the organization, but with some level of control from a centralized group, typically corporate marketing or PR.
Getting a program off the ground usually involves some level of outsourcing to launch the social media profiles and blog(s), and get the program rolling. The biggest reason for this is just pure resource availability. Few companies start out putting someone full time on social media in the launch phases, it’s usually tacked onto someone’s current job. Ideally, social media should become part of many people’s job vs. one person because employees are really the social face of your business (in the flesh) and have the most expertise to offer than does an outsourced person. But, learning those ropes can be tricky, so it is smart to get help in the beginning and see which employees can step up to the plate to actively participate.
Here’s another chart that helps match the level of budget according to social maturity, and validates what we have seen in our client experiences:
It’s important to remember that embarking on a social media strategy is a journey and not a destination. It needs to be viewed in part with other marketing and communication strategies that are being planned throughout the year and should not be done in isolation. And make sure a listening program is initiated along with the actual social media duties because this is imperative to long term success. Listening can start out as a manual process, but most companies quickly realize that there is a lot of “junk” to wade through before getting to the real nuggets revealed in a listening campaign. In those cases, investment in a listening tool becomes a priority to help identify opportunities and discover communities and people to connect with.
To see the entire PPT, here it is in SlideShare. What have been your experiences in launching social media? Does this sound familiar?
