The 25 Marketing Lessons from Marketing Sherpa sheds interesting oversight on the marketing plans of companies intend to grow their search and social campaigns / budgets in 2010.

Economic circumstances are driving changes to the buying process. People are deceasing time at tradeshows or reading email campaigns.  Social media, search engines and virtual events are increasing in Useage (see chart on p12 of report). Social media sites such as blogs and social networking sites are growing popularity due to their unbiased objectivity

Marketers are using social media as a means to amplify their SEO, PR and Viral campaigns (P28 Chart) which means that social media has impact on other campaigns and should not be reviewed insolation.

Metrics which companies are using to measure their social media campaigns are:

These metrics prove the effectiveness of social media in achieving business objectives such as increasing brand awareness or increasing sales revenue (see page 44).

However there are many challenges facing social media marketeers to improve the effectiveness of the campaigns:

• Increasing ROI on social media campaigns
• Converting followers and fans into customers
• Getting target audience to engage and participate

This conversion from fan or follower to customer is becoming  a growing challenge and a key one to improving the ROI for social media campaigns.  As time goes by social marketers will grow more skilled and proficient in this field, which will mean that social media can become main stream within the digital marketing mix.