Good news: Social Media Spending Up. Bad News: (Read on)

Forrester Research finds in a December 2008 survey that 53% of marketers who are already using social media marketing will increase their spending on social media marketing in the next six months. Only 5% expect to decrease their budget. Good news, right?

Sort of. As report author Jeremiah Owyang points out in his blog, “this doesn’t mean that budgets are expanding immensely, since this is a ‘new’ media, these are small budgets. How small? I say minuscule. Three-quarters of marketers have $100,000 of less budgeted for social media marketing.”

Do the math: Forrester surveyed 145 marketers, 114 of whom were already using social media marketing (that’s an impressive 78% of marketers surveyed, by the way). But of those 114, 75%, or 85.5 marketers, are spending at most $100,000–or less than the price of a single prime-time 30-second spot in Q4 2008, according to data from Targetcast cited in The New York Times. Going price for that 30 seconds? $122,000.

Of course, 25% of Forrester’s respondents are spending more than $100,000 on social media marketing. But who knows how much more? $101,000? $500,000? $1 million?

Last week I spoke at the Seattle Direct Marketing Association’s annual conference. I sat in on the social media marketing session, which was so full that extra chairs had to be brought in. But one comment from a panelist stuck with me. He advised attendees to go out and prove their case for social media marketing by doing as much as they can for free. Then once they get results, he said they should go to their bosses and ask for budget to do more.

I wonder: How many bosses will look at what was accomplished for free and say “That’s good enough for me; why spend money?”

Addendum (3.18.09): ReadWriteWeb has additional details from the Forrester report. According to one chart, 49% of marketers surveyed had budgeted $30,000 or less for soft costs such as services, strategy and support, and 40% had budgeted the same range for actual social media tools. The survey group for this data consisted of 83 respondents who worked for companies with 250+ employees, and knew the details of their social media budgets.