80% will use Social Media by 2011 But…

More businesses are using social media for marketing and a steady growth in adoption rate is expected. eMarketer’s predicted that 80% of the businesses (with more 100 employees) will adopt social media for marketing purposes by 2011.

That is 4 out of every 5 businesses. The forecast was based on a dozen of third party surveys accompanied by independent studies on social media trends like consumer usage and companies’ social media involvement. Currently, about three-quarters of businesses are using social media this year.

“Marketers that have spent the past few years ramping up their internal social media marketing infrastructure—and their presence on sites such as Facebook and Twitter—will take social media to new heights in 2011,” said Debra Aho Williamson, an eMarketer principal analyst.

In another survey conducted by Maxymiser, it was revealed that social media ranked third in terms of focus for 2011. 38 percent of the respondents said that social media would be within the budget focus. Social media only fell behind search ads and website creation/optimization.

Below is the ‘but’.

What does it say if we put the two sets of data side-by-side? It seems that social media is in almost every marketers’ plan but not many are willing to invest in the plan. It is a total contradiction. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why businesses fail in social media. How many businesses are able to be as serious as Dell (which recently set up a social media listening center)? Not many. I’m not suggesting that businesses should spend thousands or millions. But the plan and investment have to go hand-in-hand. The current situation seems to suggest that many marketers have a plan but have no desire to push it through. Of course, this analysis could be biased because the two surveys are generated from different pool of people. But one thing for sure, social media marketing isn’t as rosy as it seems to be.