How Companies Respond to Social Media

A really on point post from Dave Fleet. These are the five ways in which companies typically respond to social media.

http://davefleet.com/2009/06/five-levels-social-media-responses/

B2B Marketing

Forrester and MarketingProfs conducted a survey of B2B marketers to see what’s working and where they were spending money during the economic downturn. The report itself costs $279, but they disclosed some of the findings in this press release.

Key findings in the report include:
• 47% of B2B marketers plan to increase spending on company websites and search marketing this year.
• 42% plan on increasing expenditures on podcasting or online video.
• 36% will increase their budgets for discussion forums, social networks and communities.
• 31% say they will actually decrease their budget for online display ads.

Twitter Research

Some really great data in here from Harvard about behavior patterns and Twitter.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

Campbell's and Hunger

This is a really good case study about how to incorporate social networking into a philanthropic effort. Campbell's has launched the Help Hunger Disappear campaign in Canada and associated with that campaign is a Web site that incorporates social networking technologies.

http://www.helphungerdisappear.com/index.html