Accidentally on Purpose Blog

• Ten Ideas for Conversation
• Approaching 10 Years After Cluetrain, Most Still Don’t Get It
• Report: Social Media Challenging Traditional Media
  

• Zude, Where’s My Social Network
• PR 2.0: Integrating Your PR Efforts with the Social Mediasphere
• Authenticity In The Face Of Crisis: Business Communication Skills

The SF Chronicle — a newspaper that has long been rumored to be suffering from the myriad challenges facing the newspaper industry — weighs in with a close look at blogger economics.  Business reporter Sam Zuckerman zooms in most closely on TechCrunch, the Silicon Valley-based tech blog that most industry watchers regard as the bellwether for commercial blogs.

TechCrunch illustrates the new blogging math. It sells sponsorships that allow advertisers to display on the home page at $10,000 per month. It also uses Federated Media to sell display ads, keeping 60 percent of the revenue. And it charges $200 to list in its Cool Jobs section, getting about five or six want ads per day. Parties and conferences add another income source. Last month, TechCrunch organized a two-day event at the Palace Hotel that gave 40 startups a platform to tout their wares.

And, as far as spending goes, “our costs are only headcount,” Arrington said.

Let’s assume that newspapers need to study blogger economics in order to get ahead, or even keep up (btw, that’s a big assumption, because despite the success of TechCrunch, GigaOm, and other popular commercial blogs, the top line is not there for many others).  One lesson for newspapers has got to be depressing:  the overhead of running a commercial publishing enterprise has plummeted to a level where almost anyone can jump in.  But note that Michael Arrington and others are spending on “headcount.”  By that, of course, he means writers, and that’s not-so-bad news for journalists.  The new publishing world continues to drive the demand for good content.  Only question is, who’s hiring?

This is interesting, and it’s a nice follow-up to the recent NYTimes article I posted about last week. Prospero, a social-media vendor, has posted a study which shows that social-media spending is on the rise. Quoting MarketingVox, here are the key takeaways from the study:

Prospero’s 2007 Social Media Survey found 30 percent of online marketers who use social media plan to spend significantly more on social-media applications in 2008, while an additional 58 percent also plan to increase spending, though not “significantly.”

Some 59 percent of respondents reported that social media performance in 2007 met or exceeded their marketing objectives.

Survey participants were from leading brand organizations from a variety of industries, including Media, Education, Financial Services, Health, and Sports and Gaming.

Asked about social media return on investment (ROI), 35 percent reported positive ROI and 41 percent said that ROI was “unknown.”

What’s most interesting, to me, is that the report claims that marketing pros are not so interested in “ROI.” Why this matters: marketing folks of course care whether social media is effective. They wouldn’t approve bigger budgets if they thought otherwise. But I would bet that many marketing pros recognize that an investment in social media is a “must have” — regardless of the proven models for measurement because the entire business world is moving in that direction, and they cannot afford to be left behind.

Technorati Tags: Social Media Spending, ROI