Marketers Face Steep Web 2.0 Learning Curve

• 67% of respondents consider themselves beginners at using social media for marketing purposes.
• More than 87% of respondents are not regularly measuring the ROI of their social media marketing efforts.
• Though marketers are paying attention to social media and see a future in it, they still consider the social media world akin to the “Wild West.”

I like that last point about the "Wild West." The thing about the Wild West was that someone had to tame it, so why not your company? In these challenging economic times being the last person to the frontier, being the last one to dig into social media for marketing your company will probably be far worse than doing some trials and making a few mistakes along the way.

It’s at least heartening that 67% of those in the report say they plan to increase their social media advertising budget in 2009 and see some benefits to using social media. But even without advertising on social networks there are alot of simple things business-to-business companies can do to get their feet wet without spending much at all: blogging, Twitter, YouTube are just a few.