Forrester Social Marketing Expert Jeremiah Owyang believes that the future of the social web is entering the era of social colonization. Given these insights, Jeremiah offered his perspective on the best strategies marketers have to implement to be successful. Of all the largest corporate brands, Jeremiah believes Dell is doing the best job in social media today. When asked what an average corporation spends on social media today, Jeremiah said the budget was around $100,000.

In these tough economic times, marketer’s budgets are getting slashed and the situation requires innovative thinking to leverage small dollars. Virtual events are now part of the marketing mix and a good means of creating marketing dollar leverage. Jennifer Jones spoke to Brent Arslaner of Unisfair, a virtual events company for marketing and recruiting purposes about they are seeing their business increase 100% year over year growth due to marketer’s demand. Forrester says 20% of US companies have used virtual events at some point in their marketing.

Making a corporate culture more innovative, and open, so it can listen and share is the advice of Forrester VP and Analyst of Customer Experience, Bruce Temkin. He believes it is time for corporate management to change and adopt his 6 new imperatives. Temkin and Jones discuss how to do this, and describe the best practices of LEGO who Temkin believes is a good example of an open communicative culture.

Not being social enough is a big problem for corporations trying to use social media. That’s what Jeremiah Owyang and his team at Forrester discovered in a new report. Forrester selected 16 firms across four industries and found only one company worthy of accolades. What makes BMW a social marketing winner? In part, it’s that the automobile manufacturer managed to avoid the most common pitfalls, which is still where most firms fell short. Some examples of those easy-to-make mistakes: creating marketing programs that aren’t self-fueling, that don’t encourage members to participate in conversations amongst themselves and that don’t include some amount of participation from the corporation, itself.

Jeremiah discusses his findings with Jennifer Jones in this Marketing Voices podcast.

Marketers are looking for a way to make the customer’s online experience better. Kerry Bodine, principal analyst of Forrester gets just how to do that. She explores how user-centered design processes, design-centric corporate cultures, and organizational structure contribute to the creation and sustainability of superior customer experiences. Marketing Voices spoke to Kerry at the Forrester Marketing Forum in early April about her perspective.

[tags]Forrester, forrester marketing forum, Interactive Web Design, Jennifer Jones, Kerry Bodine, Marketing, Marketing Voices, social media[/tags]

Economists are hinting if not insisting that the U.S. is in a recession. Most often marketers are hit hard by a recession, as they and their budgets are the first to get cut. Forrester’s Josh Bernoff gives tips on how marketers should be thinking about social media now and what to do given this environment. Bernoff also talks about his upcoming book on social marketing and media: Groundswell that he is co-authoring with Forrester’s Charlene Li. He spoke with Jennifer Jones for this Marketing Voices podcast.

Microblogging is a social media tool that allows users to send brief updates to public and private networks. Peter Kim, Senior Analyst of Forrester Research tells how marketers are using the medium today and what best practices are for its use. Kim reports that there really are no rules for use of Twitter and that marketers should be enormously creative when devising a social media strategy to use microblogging. Kim’s Forrester report is available at:

www.forrester.com/marketingvoices.

Kim’s blog is:

ww.beingpeterkim.com