There’s a great slide deck and data analysis on Jeremiah Owyang’s blog from his Keynote at LeWeb this week. The analysis is based on the survey data collected in Altimeter’s latest research report on the Career Path of the Social Strategist.
In the slide deck, there’s good analysis on how most social media programs are structured and organized (org models, team size, budget etc) and, in the predictions section in 2011, there’s telling data on where companies are going to focus, as well as spending changes based on maturity of corporations –notice how advanced companies shift to customization and social media boutiques, and how important a factor companies see scalability being to a program’s (perceived) viability/success.
One thing I find fascinating about the data (see slides 15 & 16) is that budgets don’t increase that much for maturing programs. Even though average head count jumps from 3 to around 21, spend barely more than doubles. That seems like a red flag – it likely indicates that, even though companies realize that it’s important to sink money into their social programs (it’s an essential spend for CRM), the programs themselves aren’t generating much revenue/ROI and that most of the benefits are intangible (like customer service) and hard to measure. Given that this is such a new initiative for most companies, it makes sense that they’ll focus on wrapping their heads around better ways to measure their ROI going forward.
Check out Jeremiah’s post for more screenshots and discussion on this topic. Also, download the report. Really good stuff.