BusinessWeek announced today that Yuri Milner, the man behind the Moscow-based Internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies, has allocated a cool $1 billion for investing in social web startups over the next five years.
DST usually takes small stakes in big, proven companies that aren’t necessarily interested in offering public shares. Recently Milner’s company plunked down $200 million for an almost 2% stake in Facebook, the world’s largest social network. This strong investment by DST in social media technology is yet another health indicator of the space during this difficult economic climate.
Coca-Cola and Unilever are moving away from traditional campaign sites and toward social web sites like Facebook and YouTube. And this year – for the first time in 23 years – Pepsi did not show commercials during the Super Bowl broadcast. Instead, the company plans to give away over $20 million in their social campaign The Pepsi Refresh Project. Until this year, Pepsi was one company you could depend on spending millions of dollars for the change to be one of the Super Bowl advertisers.
This increase in spending supports the Forrester survey released in March of 2009 which reports a whopping 95% of social media marketers will maintain or increase their social media spending. What’s driving this? As the executive summary of the report says, “These inexpensive tools can quickly get marketing messages out through interactive discussion and rapid word of mouth, and properly managed, can deliver measurable results.”
In the above Google trend graph we can see that the average number of times the term “social media” has appeared in Google News stories has increased steadily since 2007. (This is also the year that Twitter account numbers exploded). Since 2008, mentions of the term “social media marketing” have also increased. Although this term lags behind “social media” in momentum, this gain is indicative of the growing acceptance of using social media technology to promote businesses.
The Forrester report is validated by recent announcements from huge companies like Coke/Unilever and Pepsi who continue to pour their marketing dollars into social media channels.
With DST investing heavily in social media technology, steadily increasing Google buzz, a Forrester survey suggesting almost all marketers plan to spend their budget on social media marketing – including giant companies Coke/Unilever and Pepsi – it looks like the social media marketing trend is here to stay.
The Forrester report says it best: social media playtime is over. Now it’s just business as usual.
