"How Will You Spend Your Money?"

I'm a big fan of Forrester Research because they always seems to craft studies that mean something.

This latest effort "Social technology marketers bullish in face of recession" is not exception.

Josh Bernoff asks: "Assuming the economy is in a recession in the next six months, how would you change your investment in interactive marketing overall?"

Here are the results:

"Social networks will get the largest number of increases, over 40% of those using it, along with user-generated content, blogs, and that old standby, email marketing. Every single form of online marketing we surveyed had at least half the marketers increasing or maintaining their investment (online display ads fared the worst; based on this sample it could see more decreases than increases.)"

Email still fares pretty well. But here's the BEST piece of advice he offers: "Our advice to marketers, as describe in the report, is this: measure what you do, so you can justify it when the axe comes. And build assets, not campaigns, it's a better use of your money."

All too often we're focused on "campaigns" instead of "long term annuities" because of short term pressure. I wrote about a company early on called NCI Mobility.

Once again, I fall back to my take on 'what happens when the campaign is over' philosopy. NCI helps you do wireless data capture at events, sends the information back to a server in 'close' to real time and allows you te recontact event participants within 24 hours if you wish.

If you're going to spend time building an expensive marketing program do something to get the most out of it long term. If you build a great database...use it...keep it clean and develop a 'deep relationship' with your base customer.

I'm not shocked here about the increase in social network marketing either. It is a BIG buzz word as of late. My previous posts about 'trust' and 'authenticity' play right into this concept.

The biggest category for building a brand now is "user generated content". Once again, people trust the opinions of like minded people instead of some mundane advertisement forced on them.