Social media budgets to go up by 2010

In a survey of 133 CMO's (Chief Marketing Officers) culled from a wide-cross section of industries- IT, travel and hospitality, media/publishing , consumer durables and retail- and many more with annual revenues ranging between USD 1 million to USD 1 billion- by Bazaarvoice and CMO Club, findings show that there shall be a substantial percentile increase in the number of designatories who attach ROI to social media planning in 2010; nearly 2/3 of the participants of the survey plan to hike up media budgets in the New Year and expect to thus see a 10% increase in sales.

The study is indicative that most CMO's target social media to hit the bottom line in 2010-a booster to sales revenues as opposed to the test and trial period of 2009. Thus, the onus will see a shift form web-centric solution such as page views, "fans' and traffic to those more directly linked to overall business-conversions and average order value, together with sales. 2009 saw only 36% of companies owing the impact of social media on conversions and 22% on revenue;by 2010 ,81% of the CMO's target 10% of their sales as aggregating as a result of social media.

At large, the benefits of social media still remain murky- 50% pf the survey participants expressed doubts as to using Twitter, Linkedln and industry blogs as tools. Nonetheless, for the greater part, the CMO's plan to utilize user-based tools such as Twitter, customer reviews and pre-sales Q&A to influence product decisions.

Twitter sees an immense gain in 2010 by permitting its comments to be used to boost sales, with a 407% increase forecast by the survey. As Bazaarvoice is the supplier of these reviews and other UGS to retail and manufacture sites, the benefits are manifold