A detailed survey of 267 people, comprising of working professionals, executives and business leaders, conducted by exchange4media.com and Blogworks in December 2008 & January 2009, affirms certain perceptions related to Social Media. Social Media is being seen by a majority (53%) of the respondents to the survey as a long term strategy, and though most of them are currently spending less than 5% of their budgets on this domain, budget allocation is expected to increase, but steadily, over the next two years. Note that as many as 15% of the respondents are spending over 20 percent of their budget on the segment. Social Media is the term used to represent media formats that allow interactivity and sharing, including blogs and social networking, video and bookmaring sites, among others. Download the report here. Social Media Metrics For us, the key finding involves the metrics that marketers are using to evaluate the impact of social media: this is a topic often debated in informal conversation. A majority of the respondents believe that the success or failure of a campaign can be judged on the basis of brand awareness; the volume of user generated content, the number of touch points with the customer, website traffic and search engine ranking, and the positive tone of links, feedback, reviews, forwards etc are also being seen as metrics. Frankly, we're not sure sure of how some of these metrics can be quantified for the purpose of comparison: when it comes to social media, each campaign would…
