There’s No Such Thing As A Free Lunch (Perspectives on Altimeter's Social Budgets Report)

Yes, YOU may get your lunch for free but somewhere along the food chain somebody is paying for that lunch. And that’s true for social media too. You may not see it, but somebody is footing the bill either by paying cold hard cash or by investing time and resources. Earlier today, Altimeter released its latest report on “How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets”. If you haven't read it yet, I’ve inserted the report below for your reading pleasure. If I were to sum up this report in one sentence, it would be “corporations must budget spending based on their maturity level”: novice, intermediate and advanced. 

Here are my (personal) perspectives on some of the key findings in this report.

“All corporations will gear up on Staff to Manage social business, yet investment in Training and Education will be low.” The double-edged sword. The difficult, yet necessary, trade-off decision practitioners need to make. If budgets (and resources might I add) were infinite (or much larger), training and education would be higher on the priority list to receive more funding. I think today many practicing companies (at least on the Intermediate and Advanced levels) already have some level of internal training in place. The question for them is really about providing the next level of training as their social practitioners have moved beyond “Training 101”. Their questions have become more elaborate and detailed. How can practitioners bridge this gap while waiting for the wallets to open up? On page 8, Altimeter mentions external resources to tap into so I’ll skip those. Complement those suggestions with internal informal learning programs such as 1) company-wide best practices sharing by advanced internal practitioners, 2) inter-company best practices sharing and collaboration, and 3) company-wide best practices sharing by your trusted vendors and agencies.

“Corporations will fail to leverage the social graph and continue to rely on traditional advertising and marketing tactics.” I just want to point you to some of my earlier posts on this topic, need I say more?

• 3 Social Media Practices That Make Me Itch
• Quick Tips to Plan Your Social Media Engagement: 4P Framework
• Social Media Engagement: Integrating It Into Your Business

What this means is social business is just business. Social media is not one person’s job and it’s not just another series of platforms to push your marketing messages to.

“Advanced buyers will seek specialized expertise from Boutique Agencies.” The only thing I would add here is “Boutique Agencies (or Social Vendors) that can scale. This is a big thing for large organizations. Why? Because it's just like dating: you like somebody, you will want to spend time with them. If we like you and have had a good experience with you, we will tell others within the company about you and at some point, chances are they will want to work with you too. So if you’re not ready to scale or if you have taken on too much, please be honest with us. Let us know. We’d rather work with you on a later project than have a (series of) bad experience(s) with you... We talk to each other. We ask each other for recommendations. We share the good stuff…and the bad stuff. That’s how WOM/social media works internally.

As promised, here is the report. Enjoy, it’s a good read.

How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Nuggets from Altimeter’s Corporate Social Strategists Report

Earlier today, Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) published a report on the Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist.

Instead of summarizing his findings, in this blog post, I want to highlight some statistics and observations that really stood out to me. I think we suspected these things all along but seeing them in writing confirms our assumptions (or at least my assumptions). I’m excited to see some data we can use to help build a case or prove a point. The following quotes come directly from the report:

• We found that 41% of survey respondents said they were “reacting” to requests – rather than getting ahead of them. Yet the pressure is only mounting…
• Nearly 60% of surveyed Social Strategists classified their organizational model as “Hub and Spoke” or “Multiple Hub and Spoke”…
• Unsatisfied, they expressed a desire for more effective ROI measurements – 48% of Social Strategists have made measurement a primary objective for their 2011 program…
• In our recent count, there are 145 brand monitoring firms, 125 community platforms, thousands of social media agencies, and of out-of-work professionals who turn to social media careers.
• In the next few years, expect groups that first shunned social media to seek direct involvement – or run their own programs to regain power.
• We heard from one Social Strategist that the number of internal demands will increase “from 4 to 5 times more requests this year from last.”… At the same time, external demands will increase as social media becomes mainstream and customers learn to voice their complaints publicly.
• Some Strategists said that success would mean being out of a job in the coming years. One Strategist said: “In five years, this role doesn't exist. The role will be subsumed into every part of the company.”

And last but not least, I love this quote:

“There’s a significant parallel between ERP programs of the late 90s and today’s social business programs – both require deployment across the entire enterprise. However, ERP rollouts were well funded and staffed, with dedicated project management teams and often, an army of embedded consultants. While social business programs likewise touch every business unit, the difference in resources and headcount is stark.”


Although this report focuses on the career path of social strategists; as a practitioner, I’d just like to emphasize again that in addition to your social media managers, long-term and continuous engagement from your content, or subject matter, experts is critical.