2008 Promises to be a Big Year for Social Media

Jeremiah Owyang’s blog linked to an article from Lewis PR indicating that 2008 will be a big year for social media adoption. In particular:

Over 90 per cent of marketing departments are planning to launch a social media campaign in 2008, despite the fact that over a third are yet to use social tools in their organisation.

This is consistent with my experiences with clients this year. There is a lot of interest in participating in social media, but little understanding of what this would mean for organizations.

Awareness of the impact of social networking and in particular viral marketing has reached the point where people are asking for it, but their expectations are that they can simply add it to their site without the associated work to nurture the network and community.

There is already a lot of opportunity to help businesses understand how to participate in social media, and it looks like we’re going to have more of these conversations for the foreseeable future.