• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, June 24, 2008

By its very nature, the success of social media marketing could lead to significantly smaller media budgets, according to media experts and planners gathered for the OMMA Social conference on Monday.

 

"It just doesn't cost that much money to make social media advertising effective," said Brian Wieser, MAGNA Global SVP. "That's the whole point. The brand that is Google spent how much on advertising to build their brand?"

Yet more involved social media buys require ever-greater resources, argued Greg Verdino, Crayon chief strategy officer. "It's takes a lot of human resources to reach out," he said. "That's where a lot of these campaigns go awry," referring to campaigns that fail to engage consumers.

Wieser, for his part, does not consider himself a pessimist regarding the future of social media monetization. "It could be market expanding more than anything else," he said regarding the overall media market.

Social media's greatest value at the moment, according to some, is still as a research tool.

"It's really about listening, and an opportunity to do research," said Rich Gagnon, DRAFT FCB chief media officer "You have to be thinking about social media as a cultural trend."

Most experts on Monday agreed that effective social marketing goes way beyond banner ads on MySpace. "You can make social media a flat-out media buy by running a big banner ad campaign on MySpace, but that part of it really isn't that special," said David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy at digital agency 360i.

Added Seth Goldstein, CEO and co-founder, SocialMedia Networks: "People are coming to systematically ignore anything that is not social."

Goldstein himself is optimistic about the future of social media spending. "Money going into social media is typically at the end of the media buy," he said. "You'll start to see it at the beginning of the campaigns."

MAGNA Global's Wieser insisted that standardization is essential to the growth of the social media spend, but not everyone agreed.

"Social media growth relies more on productization than standardization," according to Steve Jang, CMO and EVP of business development at social media site imeem. "Clients will have to work with products from different companies," he said.