Advertisers Switching To Social Media
Mar 24th, 2009 | By James Lewin | Category: Making Money with Podcasts 
eMarketer reports that advertisers are switching to social media.
“Companies are learning how to leverage social media and tap into the rising tide of consumers participating in social network sites, blogs, wikis and Twitter,” they note.
The claim is supported by research from the Aberdeen Group, who found that nearly 2/3rds of the companies they surveyed plan to increase social media marketing budgets this year.
Aberdeen also suggests that “best-in-class companies” should treat social media as an important part of their marketing.”
“Companies use multiple approaches to identify the individuals who wield the greatest amount of influence in any given topic area and to track changes in their influence over time,†said Jeff Zabin of Aberdeen. “Best-in-class companies engage these top influencers as brand evangelists, and then track the impact of their words and actions in terms of return on marketing investment.â€
eMarketer’s article echoes a recent Forrester report, which found that marketers are moving their advertising dollars to social media.
What do you think? Is this good news for professional podcasters, bloggers and new media content creators, or do you think most of the advertising dollars will go to large sites like YouTube?
I won’t speak for all forms of new media, but I suspect things will still be a bit of an uphill struggle for podcasters. I recently spoke with David Plotz, the editor of Slate.com, who’s part of the Slate Political Gabfest podcast. He says getting a good advertiser for the podcast, which attracts up to 60,000 listeners on any given week, has been a struggle. This is despite the fact that he also maintains that podcast listeners are far more valuable than an average Slate.com reader. (I’ll be posting the interview tomorrow on my site http://www.atomicpodcasts.com, where he goes into more details on both of these things.)
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