Some 35% UK organisations believe that the impact of social media is now just as, or more important than traditional media, according to a study carried out by PR consultancy, Portfolio Communications. Despite this, around 90% of organisations are
not allocating a budget to a dedicated social media programme – though 31% say they plan to do so within the next six months.

Portfolio’s Jonathan Bawden, commented: “This highlights the problem of how organisations are going to fund social media programmes without ‘stealing’ budget from other areas, such as traditional PR and advertising campaigns. Already, we have
come across organisations that have appointed social media programme managers without any budget to support them. Not only does this illustrate weak leadership in the ‘we have to do something to tackle social media, but don’t quite know what’ mould, it also encourages budget-holding PR, advertising and other marketing departments to defend their empires. Such a position can be create ‘silos’ that work against the integration of expertise and resources that organisations need to generate competitive advantage as they – and the wider economy – fight to come out of recession.”

The study also found that just 29% of organisations currently make use of external blogs, and only 25% make use of Twitter, despite the major benefits these media can deliver at relatively low cost.

Bawden continued: “While it takes considerable effort and is time-consuming for an organisation to run its own blog, it is possible to make use of this powerful social medium by contributing to relevant ‘external’ blogs – that is, blogs run by others. Indeed, the majority of bloggers welcome such contributions as they can add significant value and credibility.

“The same is true for other social media tools. Generating the information to make a corporate Twitter account worth following can be surprisingly time-consuming, even if generating the actual tweets themselves is not. However, it is possible to contribute to social media by pointing to research, market reports, case studies and opinion pieces that can add significant value to a debate while taking remarkably little time to execute.”

Further details of the study are available at: http://www.portfoliocomms.com/downloads.html

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