It’s all the rage. Everyone wants to dive head first into social media…and many do, without so much as a glance into the water before they jump. The backlash is coming. It shouldn’t be a surprise, really. It happens when a new idea excites the market. Everybody does it, and does it wrong, then everybody gets disillusioned, and then some percentage of “everybody” figures out how to do it right. And life goes on, sans hype. The social web is in the early stages of a massive dry-heave that will eventually purge the idiots and leave the rest of us to do our jobs in a far-less-muddy environment.

Take a look at this table, outlining total advertising spend by category, projected out from 2006 through 2010. New marketing is definitely on the rise…

Outsourced services like those provided by agencies and consultants are often sacrificed during economic downturns in favor of perceivably less expensive in-house resources. But when you examine which resource is planning and executing programs more effectively, it’s not surprising to see that agencies and consultants who specialize in social media marketing and PR are at least 19% more likely to plan and execute effectively than in-house teams and agencies or consultants who are not specialized in social media.

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.

The chart in Preview 3 showed that the “Inability to measure ROI” was the second most significant barrier to social media adoption. But as this chart shows, the ability to accurately measure ROI has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the tactic. In fact, “Advertising on blogs or social networks”, which was the tactic rated as the most accurately measured (32%), was also rated least effective (16%).

Social media measurement is one of those topics about which everyone has an opinion, but nobody agrees. Like any tactic that is more aligned with PR than direct marketing, results are difficult to measure quantitatively. What marketers can do is measure the value of the resulting conversations and relationships qualitatively, and not focus on moment-in-time transactions like traffic, conversions, etc. Marketers obsessed with only tracking social media results quantitatively are missing the point and may find themselves employing much less effective social media tactics for the sake of measurability.

Whether an organization has used social media marketing and PR or not, the most significant barrier to social media adoption named by 46% of respondents is the “Lack of knowledgeable staff”. One of the dangers to the effective adoption of social media as a marketing strategy is the large percentage of those who consider themselves knowledgeable – but have no social media experience. When marketers at organizations that have not used social media marketing or PR were asked how knowledgeable they were about the subject, two-thirds replied that they were “very” or “somewhat” knowledgeable. Without social media experience, this level of knowledge is unlikely, which may be the reason “Lack of knowledgeable staff” was named as the most significant barrier to social media adoption.

During this period of continued economic uncertainty and the resulting pressure to cut marketing budgets further, social media has benefitted from the perception that it requires minimal capital investment to implement effectively. As one marketer told us, “I don’t understand big budget social media tactics. We use social media because it’s effective and FREE. The only cost associated with it in our organization is time (employee salaries), design (in-house) and occasional programming (in-house).”

The practice of marketing communications and public relations as we know it is certainly not dead, but it is just as certainly changing. Social media, and its ability to create virtual communities of common interest and trusted conversations between companies and their prospects and customers, is the catalyst of this change. Cumulatively, 68% of the 1886 marketing and PR professionals responding to our recent benchmark survey agree. 37% of decision makers strongly agreed compared to 26% of those who influence or implement social media marketing and PR programs.

The impact of this change is not limited to the way marketers communicate with customers and prospects; it is having an even greater impact on how PR agencies and in-house publicists communicate effectively with journalists and other influencers. In delving deeper, we found that 83% of agencies and consultants, whose opinions are based on a broader range of client experience, agreed with the question of change compared to 70% of client-side marketers.

In this survey, US Internet retailers were asked if these technologies would increase or decrease the effectivness of ecommerce in the next three years? According to three out of four respondents, social media will increase ecommerce effectiveness more than mobile, email marketing and ads. This is an important finding because many online retailers are itching to explore the powerful and mysterious world of social media marketing. Social media tactics like user reviews and other user generated content are proving to be powerful instruments for influencing the purchase decisions of customers.

1,200 client-side marketers, media and creative agencies were asked to name the tactic they think will offer their brand the greatest opportunity for growth in 2009. Social media integration was named most often by a 47% margin over the next leading discipline - Viral public relations - which also happens to be a social media tactic.