The below preview was originally posted at SocialTrenz.com by Sergio Balegno, senior analyst with the MarketingSherpa Research Group, and lead author of the 2009 study, “Social Media Marketing and PR: Benchmarks and best practices for harnessing the power of the social marketplace”.  Visit http://www.socialtrenz.com for the original posts or click here to buy the book.

More than 90% of companies believe that social media is effective in accomplishing branding-related goals, followed closely by goals for generating traffic on websites.

Objectives that tend to fall into the category of direct marketing, like lead generation and sales conversion, are second tier expectations. You might expect the revenue producing goals of direct marketing to be ranked higher than branding during a recessionary period like this. However, the conversational and relationship building nature of social media is more synonymous with PR and, accordingly, more likely to help build brands.

Improving internal communications is often the goal of companies in the early experimental stages of social media adoption. Internal communications is a desirable social media training and proving ground because the risk of exposing confidential information to the public is much less likely to occur in a self-contained internal environment.