It looks like budgets for Social Media in 2010 will not be affected by the current economic climate. In a recent article on , there is a forecast saying that Social Media budgets will actually increase for 2010 instead of decreasing. What's the issue here? The issue is that companies will either increase their budgets to do it, or may decrease budgets for other methods of marketing to accomplish this.

if you remember my blog post about the Innotech conference, the speaker, Giovanni Galucci, said that while it is smart to use Social Media as an avenue for Marketing, it should never be used as the the main function for Marketing. The basic methods of traditional marketing must still be used, and if companies are starting to move their budgets more towards Social Media, and away from traditional methods, this could actually hurt them in the long run.

While it is smart to allocate a higher budget towards Social Media, I believe this should only be done if the overall budget for Marketing is increased, as opposed to simply taking away funding from more traditional marketing methods. We'll see the benefits and consequences of this in 2010.